Siege survivors recovering as death toll rises

More than 750 survivors of the Moscow hostage-taking were tonight recovering from their ordeal which ended this morning when Russian special forces stormed the theatre where they had been held by Chechen gunmen.

Police officials said hours after the operation that 67 hostages were killed, but the Health Ministry later said the death toll had risen above 90.

Fifty of the captors were killed – some with a bullet to the head execution-style – officials said three other gunmen were seized on the scene, and authorities searched the city for attackers and accomplices who may have escaped.

Ambulances and city buses took most of the survivors to hospitals, stunned or unconscious from sleeping gas the special forces spread through the theatre before they charged in firing assault rifles.

The end came 58 hours after gunmen stormed into the crowded theatre during a musical, vowing to die for Chechnya’s independence and threatening to kill their captives unless Russia withdrew its troops from the war-ravaged region.

The gunmen’s precise and sophisticated attack in Russia’s capital ferociously defied the Kremlin’s frequent contention that Chechen rebels are fractured and on the verge of defeat.

A Federal Security Service official said the well-armed raiders had foreign links and contacts with unspecified embassies in Moscow, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, raising the prospect that insurgents with backing from international terrorists could be plotting other violence in Russia.

The special forces’ assault began in freezing rain before dawn when the gunmen began executing hostages, Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev said.

“About 5:15am there was shooting,” Vasilyev told reporters at the scene, about 4 kilometres (2.7 miles) south-east of the Kremlin. “There was a real threat. Therefore the operation was undertaken.”

First, the unspecified gas was spread, with the primary aim of knocking out female assailants who were wired with explosives, Vasilyev said.

Then forces stormed in. Television footage showed some kicking in glass doors and opening fire, the thunder of their weapons setting off car alarms in the theatre parking lot. The hostages were brought out, some of them in the arms of special forces, most of them loaded unconscious onto city buses.

Vasilyev, like countless others in Moscow, swung between conflicting emotions. “The goal was achieved. The hostages were freed,” he said with a firm sense of accomplishment. Then, pausing to try to master his distress, he sighed and said: “We are grieving with those close to the 67 hostages who were lost. We couldn’t save them.”

Despite the death toll, a survivor agreed that the operation was necessary. “We were all waiting to die. We understood that they would not let us out alive,” the Interfax news agency quoted its reporter Olga Chernyak, who was among the hostages, as saying.

Chernyak was in the audience at a performance of ”Nord-Ost,” a popular musical, when the gunmen stormed the theatre Wednesday night. Her call on a cellular phone to her news agency was the first public word of the raid.

None of the 71 foreigners who were among the hostages died during the crisis, Russian news agencies reported, citing diplomats at foreign missions in Moscow.

Three people were known to have been killed before the special forces assault began: a young woman whose body was brought out Thursday and two who were killed Saturday morning.

“They killed two hostages before our eyes, a woman and a man. They shot the man in the eye, there was a lot of blood,” Interfax quoted Chernyak as saying from her hospital bed. She said she lost consciousness soon afterward, apparently because of the gas.

Nine of the hostages died because of heart problems, shock or lack of medicine, Vasilyev said, but how the remainder died was not specified. No children were among the dead, he said.

The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Vasilyev as saying none of the 67 initial victims died from gas poisoning. Officials did not say what kind of gas was used, but US Ambassador Alexander Vershbow said, “we were given brief and general information that this was either an incapacitating or calming agent.”

Russian TV footage from the theatre showed the corpses of several of the female captors, clad in black robes and head coverings, sprawled in the red plush seats, their heads thrown back or on their folded hands – as if asleep, except for the precisely placed bullet holes in their heads.

The women had canisters with metal fragments and up to two kilograms (4.5 pounds) of explosives strapped to their bodies. The assailants laid many other bombs in the hall, some with the equivalent of 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of TNT, officials said.

The TV footage showed the camouflage-clad body of the assailants’ leader Movsar Barayev, lying on his back amid blood and broken glass, a cognac bottle placed by one of his lifeless hands.

Other gunmen’s corpses, the faces masked by blood, lay amid litter including syringes.

Vasilyev said puncture marks, possibly from drug injections, were found on some of the gunmen’s bodies.

Shortly after the storming, officials said some of the estimated 50 gunmen may have fled during the chaos and melted into the enormous city, but Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev told Putin hours later that none of the captors had escaped.

In the same meeting with Putin, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said about 30 accomplices of the gunmen were arrested in the Moscow area, but gave no public details.

About three hours after the storming, ambulances suddenly pulled back from the theatre area and shortly afterward, a loud bang resembling an explosion reverberated through the streets. The cause of that noise was not reported.

Putin visited survivors in Moscow’s main emergency hospital, joking with one young man who was struggling back to consciousness.

Outside another hospital, dozens of hostage relatives gathered waiting for word or the appearance of a treasured face.

Hostage Olga Dolotova embraced her mother Galina when she walked out, then hunched and pulled her jacket hood over head to shield herself from journalists.

Galina Dolotova said her 32-year-old daughter appeared to have been one of the hostages least affected by the gas, but even at that “she was in terrible shape” when she was brought in.

How the special forces spread the gas through the theatre was not immediately known, but workers had been seen digging around sewers and steam pipes near the theatre in the first day of the crisis.

Vasilyev said there were casualties among those who stormed the building, but officials gave no details.