Russia mourns gassed victims

Russia today began the new week with an official day of mourning for at least 118 people killed in the Moscow hostage crisis.

All but two of the victims died from a noxious gas used by special forces to knock out the Chechen rebels before they stormed into the theatre.

But even as doctors struggled to save people weakened by their 58 hour ordeal, the military would not reveal what gas they used. Almost 650 people remained in hospital today, including 150 in intensive care and 45 in a very serious condition.

About 700 hostages were rescued, but President Vladimir Putin has come under intense pressure at home for the way the crisis was ended.

More than 750 people freed from the theatre were rushed to city hospitals, most of them unconscious from the effects of the gas.

“In standard situations, the compound that was used on people does not act as aggressively as it turned out to (in this case),” chief Moscow doctor Andrei Seltsovsky said.

“But it was used on people who were in a specific situation for more than 50 hours. All of this naturally made the situation more difficult.”

He said medical staff were familiar with the general category of the gas, which knocks people out and can be used to anaesthetise patients for surgery, but they had not been told its name.

The gas can paralyse breathing, cardiac and liver function and blood circulation, other doctors said. The effects were made worse by the extreme conditions in which the hostages were kept – almost no movement, lack of water, food and sleep, severe psychological stress – and by chronic medical problems some suffered.

Anguished relatives crowded the gates of the hospitals, begging for news of their loved ones. Others scoured the city morgues.

Even diplomats had trouble finding information about the estimated 70 foreign citizens who were among the hostages.

A British mother and her son – Sidica and 20-year-old Richard Low – were freed during the operation. Mr Low’s father, Peter, was earlier released after complaining of heart problems.

Two foreign women, one Dutch and one Austrian, were known to have died.

As well as the 116 who died from the effects of the gas, authorities said one woman was shot and killed in the early hours of the crisis and a man was killed by a shot to the head early on Saturday.

Shortly after the Russian raid, officials had said they were provoked into starting the operation to free the hostages when the rebels killed two people.

The attackers, 18 of them women who said they were widows of Chechens killed by Russian forces, burst into the theatre on Wednesday night during a performance of the popular musical Nord-Ost.

Some of the female rebels had explosives strapped to their bodies.

They placed mines in the theatre and threatened to bring the building down unless Putin withdrew Russian troops from Chechnya.

Russian forces pulled out of Chechnya after a devastating 1994-1996 war that left separatists in charge. In 1999 Putin sent troops back in after rebels attacked a neighbouring region and after apartment block bombings that killed about 300 people were blamed on the militants.

In 1995 and 1996, rebels seized hundreds of hostages in two raids in near Chechnya that were on a similar scale to the theatre assault but far from Russia’s capital. Dozens of people died in both cases, many killed when Russian forces attacked the assailants.

Moscow officials said today that victims would receive compensation – 100,000 rubles (about €3,000) for relatives of the dead and half that amount for hostages who survived, the Interfax news agency said. The city will pay for funerals, it said.