The band of heavily armed Chechen rebels holding hundreds of hostages at a Moscow theater agreed early on Friday to free all 75 foreigners held captive, the first major breakthrough in the crisis as the siege entered its second day.
The hostages include Americans, Britons, Dutch, Australians, Austrians and Germans, and embassies were requested to send representatives to the scene to meet their freed citizens, Federal Security Service representative Sergei Ignatchenko said.
US Ambassador Alexander Vershbow was heading to the scene, the embassy said, and other cars with diplomatic license plates also were seen arriving near the theatre.
There were no immediate details on how the releases would proceed, but Interfax news agency reported the foreign captives would be freed at 9am local time (0500 GMT).
On Thursday, in one of several negotiation efforts, prominent liberal parliament member Irina Khakamada and lawmaker Iosif Kobzon — who is also a singer beloved by Chechens — spoke with the captors and one of them had promised that citizens of countries ”not at war with Chechnya” would be released, ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
Seven Russian men and women were released earlier on Friday and receiving medical care, but Ignatchenko declined to say why they had been chosen. Officials had expressed hopes that the some 30 children also among the captives would be freed on Friday as well.
The count of how many hostages were still in the theater ranged from 600 up to 800, and 39 had earlier been released. The hostage-takers, who number as many as 50, have demanded that Russian forces withdraw from Chechnya, the southern Muslim province that has been mired in war for much of the last decade.
”We are safe and sound, it’s warm and we have water and there’s nothing else we need in a situation like this,” Anna Adrianova, one of the hostages, told Ekho Moskvy radio early on Friday. She said the
hostages were pleading to Russia’s leaders for the situation to be resolved immediately — but without the use of force.
But another hostage said the situation was tense inside the theatre, and that conditions were growing worse as the captives hadn’t received food or water and been using the theatre’s orchestra pit as a toilet.
Yelena Malyonkina, representative for the Nord-Ost musical that was being staged in the theatre, said she spoke to a captive official from the production, Anatoly Glazychev, who told her that a bomb was placed in the centre of the theater and all the aisles and stage were mined.
”Both the terrorists and hostages are nervous,” Glazychev said, according to Malyonkina.
A hot water pipe burst overnight and was flooding the ground floor, Ignatchenko said, but the terrorists called it a ”provocation” and no agreement had been reached on sending repairmen into the building.
Still, Ignatchenko said some of the hostages were starting to sympathise with their captors’ cause and calling relatives from mobile phones to ask them to stage anti-war demonstrations in Moscow.
A group of about 100 protesters arrived near the theatre as dawn broke on Friday carrying banners and chanting anti-war slogans, pushing against metal barriers police were using to close off the scene.
Several said they were responding to requests to protest in calls from relatives. On Thursday, one young female hostage was shot in the chest, the
only known fatality during the siege, supposedly for trying to move around inside the theatre after the attackers carried out their raid on Wednesday night. Unable to identify her, police were publicising her description through Russian media.
In footage filmed early Friday by Russia’s NTV, whose correspondents were allowed to accompany a doctor inside the theatre, three male captors — in camouflage and carrying Kalashnikov-style rifles — were seen sitting in what appeared to be a kitchen. Two wore black masks and the other with his face exposed was identified by NTV as the group’s leader, Movsar Barayev, nephew of rebel warlord Arbi Barayev, who reportedly died last year.
Two women, part of the gang of hostage-takers, wore robes with Arabic printed on their hoods. Only their eyes were exposed, and they were cradling pistols against their chests. Both appeared to have explosives wrapped in tape around their waists, with the packages wired to a small button they carried in their hands.
The captors made no comments in the footage shown, which also later included a brief clip of a group of six women hostages guarded by one of the female attackers.
Dr Leonid Roshal, head of the Medical Centre for Catastrophes who was with the NTV crew, said the hostages were trying to keep calm and that only two or three were hysterical. He said he had treated the hostages for various minor ailments — including eye trouble, coughing and hypertension — and left behind some medication before emerging from the theatre early on Friday.
”In general, the situation is calm,” he told NTV.
The attackers, some of them women claiming to be widows of ethnic Chechen insurgents, stormed the theatre just before the second act of a popular musical on Wednesday evening.
Some audience members and many in the cast were able to flee in the early moments of the crisis, and on Thursday, two other hostages raced to freedom under fire from a grenade launcher.
President Vladimir Putin said the audacious raid was planned by terrorists based outside Russia, and the Qatar-based satellite TV channel Al-Jazeera broadcast statements allegedly made by some of the hostage-takers.
”I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living,” a black-clad male said in the broadcast believed to have been recorded on Wednesday. ”Each one of us is willing to sacrifice
himself for the sake of God and the independence of Chechnya”.
The hostage-taking occurred just 4,5 kilometres from
the Kremlin and further undermines claims by Putin and other top Russian officials who insist the situation is under control in Chechnya, where Russian soldiers suffer casualties daily in small skirmishes or mine explosions.
Putin described the hostage-taking as one of the largest terror attacks in history and claimed it had been planned ”in one of the foreign terrorist centres” that ”made a plan and found the perpetrators”. He didn’t provide evidence that the raid was organised abroad.
Near the theatre, officials set up a centre to provide
psychological counseling for distraught relatives, who desperately tried to reach family members inside the building on mobile phones.
Meanwhile, armored personnel carriers lined the streets, snipers perched on rooftops and troops patrolled the area.
Over the past decade, Chechens or their sympathisers have been involved in a number of bold, often bloody hostage-taking situations in southern Russian provinces, especially in Dagestan. – Sapa-AP