Few dare to question Putin after siege

Few Russians and no international leaders were today prepared to criticise President Vladimir Putin's use of a secret gas that ended the Moscow theatre siege but killed at least 116 hostages.

A US embassy spokesman said doctors from a Western embassy had examined some of the former hostages and concluded that "the agent they were exposed to appears consistent with an opiate rather than a nerve agent".

Opiates are sedative narcotics containing opium or one or more of its natural or synthetic derivatives.

Putin has said the theatre raid was planned abroad, and the Russian Foreign Ministry alleged that al-Qaida was involved.

The Russian president, who made no apologies for the high death toll, today vowed to fight terrorist threats wherever they originate and said he would issue orders giving the military broader power to combat terrorists.

A western diplomat in Moscow said the lack of criticism from world leaders was "understandable bearing in mind the international war against terrorism".

Stunned Russians mourned the victims of the country’s latest deadly disaster today, shocked that nearly all those who died in a hostage crisis were victims of the gas used to knock out their assailants - but relieved that hundreds of others were saved.

Moscow doctors said the 116 hostages who died after special forces raided the theatre and killed their Chechen rebel captors succumbed to the gas, a compound that today remained secret even to medical workers fighting to save people weakened after 58 hours in captivity.

Another 405 of the freed captives remained in hospital, while 239 have been released, Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matviyenko said 45 were in grave condition.

Putin declared today an official day of mourning amid some criticism over the number of hostages killed and the way they died. Russian authorities said 50 hostage-takers were killed when Russian forces released gas into the theatre before moving in firing weapons.

Two days after the end of the ordeal, Putin said he will give the military broader power to strike against suspected terrorists and their sponsors because of what he called the growing threat they could use powerful weapons – and suggested Russia would not refrain from launching strikes abroad if threatened.

“Russia will not … give in to any blackmail. International terrorism is becoming more impudent, acting more cruelly. Here and there around the world threats from terrorists of the use of means comparable to weapons of mass destruction are heard,” Putin said at a meeting with ministers.

“If anyone even tries to use such means in relation to our country, Russia will answer with measures adequate to the threat to the Russian Federation. In all places where the terrorists, the organisers of these crimes or their ideological or financial sponsors are located,” he said. ”I emphasise wherever they may be.”

Under a cold grey sky, white, red and blue Russian flags flew from buildings in the working-class neighbourhood around the theatre just south-east of central Moscow, as hundreds of mourners streamed in to lay flowers, candles and teddy-bears along a driveway leading to the building – or just stand and stare from behind metal barricades.

Pensioner Lyudmila Yemelyanova lamented the deaths but said, “There was no other way.”

“If the explosives inside had gone off, not only the theatre but all the neighbouring buildings would have been destroyed,” she said, echoing officials who said the gas was necessary to knock out assailants armed with powerful explosives, in some cases strapped to the bodies of women who said their husbands were killed by Russian forces in Chechnya.

The special forces who spread the gas before storming into the theatre did not tell city health authorities exactly what the substance was, said chief Moscow doctor Andrei Seltsovsky.

That apparently left doctors and emergency workers struggling in confusion to minister to the more than 750 hostages who were delivered to city hospitals, mostly unconscious.

Russian officials have still refused to tell foreign diplomats what exactly the gas was "despite repeated formal requests," said a US embassy spokesman.

Seltsovsky said medical personnel were familiar with the general category of the gas, which causes people to lose consciousness and can be used to anaesthetise surgical patients, but had not been told its name.

The gas can paralyse breathing, cardiac and liver function and blood circulation, the doctors said.

The effects were worsened by the extreme conditions in which the hostages had been confined - next to no movement, lack of water, food and sleep, severe psychological stress - and by chronic medical problems some suffered.

"In standard situations, the compound that was used on people does not act as aggressively as it turned out to in this case," Seltsovsky said.

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

Even diplomats had trouble finding the estimated 70 foreign citizens who were among the hostages. US consular officials searched the city’s hospitals for one of two American citizens known to have been hostages.