Oct 24, 2002 5 min read

MOSCOW (AP) – About 50 armed Chechen rebels stormed a crowded theater during a musical show Wednesday night and took hundreds of theater-goers hostage in an audacious and well-planned attack. Police and security forces surrounded the building amid sporadic gunfire. Moscow police spokesman Valery Gribakin said about 100 women and children had been let out of the theater, and news reports quoted some of them as saying there were pools of blood in the theater halls.

Those released did not see any dead bodies, but said the hostage-takers had beaten some in the audience. Two pregnant women were later released.

“The terrorists are demanding one thing – the end to the war in Chechnya,” Gribakin said.

Russian news reports said the rebels offered to release 50 more hostages if Akhmad Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya’s Moscow-appointed administration, came to the theater.

Earlier reports said the armed men and women were laying land mines inside the theater and had explosives strapped to their bodies which they threatened to blow up if Russian security forces stormed the building.

Gribakin, the police spokesman, said there were about 600 people inside the theater when it was seized

A woman who made her way out of the theater told a television interviewer the men wore camouflage as they took the stage, fired into the air and said: “Don’t you understand what’s going on? We are Chechens.”

News reports said the hostage-takers arrived in jeep-like vehicles just as the second act of the play was about to begin. When police and security forces surrounded the theater, the attackers opened fired and threw a grenade. One of the hostages, a doctor, was treating a hostage-taker who was wounded.

Russia is involved in a bloody war in Chechnya, seeking to put down a decade-old separatist insurrection in the oil-rich region. News reports cited a Chechen rebel Web site as saying the group was led by Movsar Barayev, the nephew of warlord Arbi Barayev, who was reportedly killed last year. The Web site said some of the women hostage takers were widows of Chechen rebels killed in the war with Russia.

“By the scope it can only be compared to the tragedy in New York. The situation is extreme now,” liberal Russian lawmaker Boris Nemtsov said in a television interview. “We must start a dialogue.”

Senior Russian officials had no immediate comment on the hostage taking which, in an unprecedented move, was being broadcast live from outside the theater on radio and television.

The news reports said Aslanbek Aslakhanov, a member of the national parliament from Chechnya, was inside the theater and negotiating, as was Ruslan Khasbulatov, the former speaker of the Russian parliament who is an ethnic Chechen. Khasbulatovwas a leader of the deadly uprising at the Russian parliament in 1993.

The Chechens are a small group of Muslims in north Caucasus Mountains in southern Russian. They are among the fiercest national groups in the country and battled the Russian Czars in the 19th century before being finally defeated.

They were deported en masse by Stalin to Kazakhstan in 1944 for allegedly betraying the Soviet Union and supporting Hitler. They were allowed to return to their homes in 1957. The Chechens declared independence from the Soviet Union shortly before it collapsed in 1991, but Russian forces subsequently invaded the region trying to put down the rebellion.

Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev helped force Russia to the negotiating table by leading a bloody raid on the town of Budyonnovsk in a neighboring Russian region in June 1995. His fighters briefly took more than 1,000 hostages and then escaped back into Chechnya. More than 100 civilians died.

Russian forces left Chechnya in 1996 after the disastrous two-year war but returned in 1999 after rebels raided a neighboring region and Russian authorities blamed rebels for a series of apartment bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people.

In a January 1996 raid on the southern Russian town of Kizlyar, rebels took hundreds of hostages at a local hospital. Some 78 people were killed.

An Associated Press reporter saw two ambulances, but it was unclear what connection they had to events in the theater.

The theater, a former Soviet-era House of Culture that belonged to a ball-bearing factory, was staging a performance of the musical “Nord-Ost” (North-East in German), one of Moscow’s most popular productions.

Police units and an Alpha special forces unit went to the theater and sealed the area in the freezing, wet weather. The Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet KGB, and the Interior Ministry put plan “Thunderstorm” into effect, which required all officers to report to their units.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was immediately told of the hostage taking, Interfax reported. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov went to the theater.

Located in southeastern Moscow in a working class neighborhood, the musical is based on Veniamin Kaverin’s novel “Two Captains.” The romantic novel recounts the story of two students and their different destinies during the Soviet times. The theater’s producer, Alexander Tsekalo, said on Russian television that the theater could hold 1,163 people.

According to the theater’s Web site, more than 350,000 people have seen the production since it opened.

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On the Net:

Nord-Ost: http://thenordost.com/