Gunmen Take Moscow Audience Hostage October 23, 2002 By JIM HEINTZ
MOSCOW (AP) - About 50 armed Chechen rebels seized a crowded Moscow theater Wednesday night, firing their weapons and taking hundreds in the audience hostage. 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.
``The terrorists are demanding one thing - the end to the war in Chechnya,'' Gribakin said.
Russian news 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.
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.
An AP photographer heard one of the hostage takers speaking in Chechen during a mobile phone call broadcast live on Russian television.
The news reports said Aslanbek Aslakhanov, a member of the national parliament from Chechnya, was inside the theater and negotiating.
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.
Slain 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.
Russia media reported about 700 people were inside the theater. The report could not be immediately confirmed. 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.
On the Net: Nord-Ost: http://thenordost.com/
Chechen figures negotiate with Moscow hostage gang
MOSCOW, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Two leading members of the Chechen community have entered a Moscow theatre where hundreds of civilians were being held on Thursday by an armed Chechen gang, seeking to start negotiations with the hostage-takers.
Interfax news agency quoted Kremlin aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky as saying that Aslanbek Aslakhanov, the deputy who represents Chechnya in the State Duma lower house of parliament, was in the southern Moscow theatre where 400-700 theatre-goers were being held.
He was accompanied by Ruslan Khasbulatov, a former speaker of parliament, Yastrzhembsky said, adding both men had experience of negotiating in hostage dramas.
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