Moscow theater hostage crisis

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Moscow theater hostage crisis began on the evening of the 23rd of October 2002, when 40 to 50 heavily armed masked men and women stormed the Dubrovka Theater during the second act of a sold-out musical called Nord-Ost. They fired assault rifles into the air and seized somewhere between 850 and 900 people inside. Among the hostages was an MVD general. The attackers, led by a young Chechen man named Movsar Barayev, identified themselves as a suicide squad from "the 29th Division" and wore black-and-camouflage clothing. Some 90 people managed to flee or hide in those first chaotic moments; the rest were corralled into the auditorium, where the orchestra pit became their toilet for the next three days.

  The crisis would end four days later with all 40 hostage-takers dead and 132 hostages dead as well, most from a secret gas pumped into the building by Russian special forces. What happened in those days raises questions that Russian authorities have never fully answered: What was in that gas? Who truly organized the attack? And did the rescue operation save lives, or end them?

• 2. Barayev's Demands

  ›

  Movsar Barayev was the nephew of Arbi Barayev, a slain Chechen rebel militia commander. His demand was stark: a complete, immediate, and unconditional withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya. The deadline was one week, after which he promised to begin killing hostages.

  The gunmen released a videotaped statement declaring their readiness to die. The text read, in part: "Russia has taken away this right from the Chechens and today we want to reclaim these rights, which Allah has given us." The statement concluded with a vow: "If we die, others will come and follow us."

  According to Kremlin aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky, when the attackers were told that a full troop withdrawal was impossible in such a short time, they shifted their demands: a halt to artillery and air strikes starting the next day, an end to the notorious zachistka operations, and a public statement from President Putin declaring he was working to stop the war. By the time of the siege, the conflict was killing an average of three federal troops daily.

  Cell phones passed news in both directions. Hostages called family members and described the explosives strapped to the attackers' bodies, as well as devices planted throughout the theater building. The female attackers wore Arab-style niqab, which a source noted was highly unusual for the North Caucasus region. Mufti Akhmad-Khadzhi Shamayev, official leader of Chechnya's Muslims, condemned the attack publicly and said he had no information about who the attackers were.

• 3. Three Days of Negotiation

  ›

  Singer and parliamentarian Joseph Kobzon was among the first to enter the building, arriving around 1:20 PM on the 24th of October, accompanied by three people. Shortly after Kobzon went in, a man in his sixties, appearing feeble and distraught, left the theater; the Interfax news agency identified him as a British citizen.

  Negotiations drew in a striking cast of public figures: Aslambek Aslakhanov, Irina Khakamada, Ruslan Khasbulatov, Boris Nemtsov, and Grigory Yavlinsky. Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev offered to serve as an intermediary. The attackers also demanded representatives from the International Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres. A group of Russian doctors led by Dr. Leonid Roshal, head of the Medical Center for Catastrophes, entered the theater and reported that the terrorists were not beating or threatening the hostages and that only "two or three" of them were hysterical.

  By the third day, the 25th of October, Barayev spoke directly to NTV cameras. He said his group had "come to Moscow not to kill the hostages or to fight with Russia's elite troops" but "to put an end to the war and that is it." He also said they had "already covered 2,000 kilometers by coming here."

  Several hostages died or were killed during this period. At 1:30 AM on the first night, a 26-year-old civilian named Olga Romanova crossed the police cordon on her own and entered the theater, urging hostages to resist. The terrorists believed she was an FSB agent and shot her seconds later. On the second night, a man named Gennady Vlakh rushed across the square to reach his son, who it turned out was not present; Vlakh was shot by the Chechens and his body cremated before it was properly identified. Around midnight on the 25th, a 30-year-old hostage named Denis Gribkov ran toward the female insurgents sitting near a large explosive device; stray bullets wounded Tamara Starkova and fatally wounded Pavel Zakharov, and Gribkov was later found dead from gunshot wounds.

• 4. The Gas and the Assault

  ›

  At around 5:00 AM on the 26th of October, the searchlights illuminating the theater entrance went out. Minutes later, a mysterious aerosol began filling the building through the ventilation system, though some reports also described it emerging from beneath the stage or through a specially created hole in the wall. Many hostages initially thought it was smoke from a fire.

  Hostage Anna Andrianova, a correspondent for Moskovskaya Pravda, phoned Echo of Moscow radio and conducted a live broadcast as people began feeling the effects of the gas. Russian Health Minister Yuri Shevchenko later stated it was based on fentanyl. The Chechens, some equipped with gas masks, fired blindly at Russian positions outside. Thirty minutes later, when the gas had taken effect, forces from FSB Alpha Group and Vympel, supported by an MVD SOBR unit, entered through the roof, the basement, and finally the front door.

  Several female terrorists made a dash for the balcony as they began losing consciousness, but passed out before they reached the stairs and were later found shot dead. Two Spetsnaz Alpha Group members were also overcome by the gas. After nearly one and a half hours of sporadic gun battles, the special forces blew open the doors to the main hall. According to one Alpha team member, "this is our first successful operation in years." A special forces operative told the Russian paper Moskovskij Komsomolets: "if it were a usual storming, we'd have had 150 casualties among our men, added to the hostages."

  Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev stated that the raid had been prompted by a panic caused by the execution of two female hostages; however, the shooting that served as the proximate cause had occurred roughly three hours before the operation began.

• 5. The Deadly Aftermath

  ›

  At 7:00 AM, rescuers began carrying bodies out of the theater and laying them in rows in the foyer and on the pavement outside, unprotected from falling rain and snow. Guardian correspondent Nick Paton Walsh observed that none of the bodies had bullet wounds or showed signs of bleeding, but "their faces were waxy, white and drawn, their eyes open and blank."

  Medical workers were prepared for explosions and gunfire. They were not prepared for a secret chemical agent. If the drug was an opioid receptor agonist, the antidote naloxone would have needed to be administered immediately. Instead, seventy-three hostages, including six minors, received no medical aid at all. There were several Chechens among the hostages, and it appears some went untreated because of their Chechen-sounding names. Court testimony from A. Vorobiev, Director of the Russian Academic Bacteriology Center, concluded that most or all of the deaths were caused by suffocation: hostages collapsed in seats with their heads falling back, or were transported and left lying on their backs, causing the tongue to block the airway.

  The official response made things worse. Crisis headquarters representatives told waiting relatives there had been no fatalities. The first official acknowledgment of deaths came around 9:00 AM. Deputy Interior Minister Vasilyev announced a "definitive" death toll of 67 at a 1:00 PM press conference, even while claiming no children or foreigners were among the dead. The true count kept rising: 90, then 118, then 132. By the 28th of October, 150 of the 646 remaining hospitalized survivors were in intensive care and 45 were in critical condition. Some estimates placed the overall civilian death toll at more than 200, with one list containing 204 names and others reaching 300 when counting those who died in the following year from complications.

  Moscow's health committee chairman Andrei Seltsovsky announced that all but one of the hostages killed had died from the effects of the gas, not from gunshot wounds. The official cause of death listed for all hostages was declared to be "terrorism," attributing deaths to heart attacks or physical ailments. Among the dead were 17 Nord-Ost cast members, including two child actors, and citizens of Ukraine, Austria, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Money and valuables belonging to victims vanished; official reports claimed they had been stolen by an FSB officer who was later killed in a car crash.

• 6. The Chemical Agent Mystery

  ›

  Treating the survivors was complicated from the start because the Russian government refused to tell doctors what gas had been used. In the official investigation records, it was referred to only as a "gaseous substance" or "unidentified chemical substance."

  Analysis conducted at the British chemical and biological defense laboratories at Porton Down, Wiltshire, on samples taken from the clothing of two British hostages and the urine of a third, identified two fentanyl derivatives. Neither was fentanyl itself or 3-methylfentanyl, the derivative the Russian Minister of Health had vaguely referenced. Researcher James R. Riches and his colleagues found the veterinary large animal sedative carfentanil and the anesthetic agent remifentanil, identified by liquid chromatographic tandem mass spectrometry. The Porton Down team concluded these two drugs were used as a mixture, possibly suspended in the anesthetic agent halothane.

  A study published in 2012 independently reached the same conclusion: the agent was a mixture of carfentanil and remifentanil. The Russian government itself, in a 2011 case before the European Court of Human Rights, stated the aerosol was a mixture of a fentanyl derivative and a chemical compound with narcotic action.

  The European Court of Human Rights ruled on the matter on the 20th of December 2011, ordering Russia to pay the 64 applicants in the case a total of 1.3 million euros in compensation. The court found Russia had violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights through "inadequate planning and conduct of the rescue operation" and the "authorities' failure to conduct an effective investigation." The official Moscow City Prosecutor's investigation had already been suspended on the 1st of June 2007, with the stated reason that the "culprit had not been located."

• 7. Shadows of FSB Involvement

  ›

  An independent investigation was undertaken by Russian politicians Sergei Yushenkov and Sergei Kovalev, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Hoover Institute scholar John B. Dunlop, and former FSB officers Alexander Litvinenko and Mikhail Trepashkin. Their central allegation: the FSB knew the terrorist group was coming to Moscow and directed them to the theater through an agent provocateur identified as Khanpasha Terkibayev, who used the alias "Abu Bakar." Terkibayev's name appeared on the hostage-takers' list, yet he left the theater alive.

  In April 2003, Litvinenko brought what he called "the Terkibayev file" to Sergei Yushenkov in London. Yushenkov passed the file to Politkovskaya, who managed to interview Terkibayev in person. A few days later, Yushenkov was assassinated by gunfire in Moscow. Terkibayev was later killed in what was described as a car crash in Chechnya.

  In June 2003, Litvinenko told the Australian television programme Dateline that two militants inside the theater, "Abdul the Bloody" and "Abu Bakar," were FSB agents, and that "the FSB got its agents out." French journalist Anne Nivat reported in January 2003 that Barayev himself had been arrested two months before the siege and was already in Russian custody when it occurred. A late Duma deputy, Yurii Shchekochikhin, wrote that additional female hostage-takers were also in custody at the time. NTV accidentally captured what appeared to be a hushed conversation in which Abu Bakar quietly corrected Barayev to name Aslan Maskhadov as having ordered the operation, a detail that would conveniently implicate the separatist president.

  Arman Menkeev, a retired GRU major specializing in explosives, was arrested by the Interior Ministry in November 2002 at a Moscow Oblast base allegedly used by the terrorists but was released shortly after. The plastic explosive found in the theater was described as "imitation plastic explosives" with "a Ministry of Defense origin." Apart from two suicide belts, most of the theater's bombs also lacked essential components like batteries, a circumstance that made the storming operation far more viable than it otherwise would have been.

• 8. Political Consequences

  ›

  President Putin addressed the nation on the morning of the 26th of October, declaring that the government had "achieved the near impossible, saving hundreds... of people" and that the rescue "proved it is impossible to bring Russia to its knees." He declared Monday a national day of mourning and vowed to continue fighting what he called "international terrorism."

  On the 28th of October, two days after the crisis, Putin cancelled plans to reduce the 80,000 troop presence in Chechnya. In early November, Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov announced large-scale operations throughout the republic, which a pro-Moscow Chechen official said produced a new wave of refugees. Putin also dismissed Maskhadov's offer of unconditional peace talks; Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov compared the idea to Europe negotiating with Osama bin Laden.

  The Russian Duma approved sweeping anti-terrorism legislation in early November, banning publication or broadcast of any statement that "hinders an operation to break such a siege, or attempts to justify the aims of the hostage-takers." Sergei Yushenkov, whose Liberal Russia party voted against the change, was quoted as saying: "On a wave of emotion, we have in fact legitimised censorship and practically banned criticism of the authorities in emergency situations." A separate law mandated that the bodies of people convicted or accused of terrorism would not be returned to families but disposed of in secret; this law was later applied even to the body of President Maskhadov, who was killed in 2005.

  Putin's approval ratings rose rather than fell. In December 2002-83% of Russians reportedly declared themselves satisfied with his handling of the crisis. The Russian Duma refused to form an investigative commission to probe the government's actions, and the independent investigators who tried faced outcomes ranging from assassination to suspicious traffic deaths. In 2003, Human Rights Watch documented increased police harassment of Moscow's Chechen population, which had grown from roughly 20,000 in the Soviet period to an estimated 80,000 by 2002.