At Least 90 Captives Die in Moscow Raid

At least 90 people held captive by Chechen militants perished in a police rescue operation Saturday, officials said, amid disquieting indications that a special gas used by the assault forces might have been the main cause of a death rate of more than one out of 10 hostages.

The Interior Ministry said the assault shortly after dawn by elite police units and officers of the state security service killed 50 Chechen militants who had taken the audience at a theater prisoner, vowing to blow up themselves and the 750 captives if Russian troops did not leave their homeland.

Authorities called the raid a success. But the death toll among the hostages, which became public knowledge only hours later, cast a pall on any mood of official or private celebration.

Claims of success were “clearly an exaggeration,” said Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta who had tried to mediate with the hostage-takers. “Even if only about 100 people died, as the authorities are saying, that number is tremendous.”

“They say it is a big victory. For whom? Definitely not for me,” said 52-year-old Yelena Molotova, distraught because she could not find her daughter, 33, on the lists of survivors posted at various hospitals. “I guess my daughter’s life does not count for much to those who’d call this a victory.”

President Vladimir V. Putin made a nationally televised address that was part apology and part praise for his forces. He said the outcome of the hostage crisis would have been far worse if police had not acted against such a “dangerous, inhuman and cruel” enemy.

“The lives of hundreds and hundreds of people have been saved,” he said. “We have proven that it is impossible to bring Russia to its knees.”

“But now, I address especially the relatives of those who died, we were not able to save everybody. Please, forgive us.”

Foreigners’ Fate Unclear

The fate of the estimated 75 foreign hostages captured alongside the rest of the audience and cast of “Nord-Ost” was not clear, although Russian authorities said initially that none was harmed. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said it had not succeeded in verifying the condition of three American citizens and one permanent resident believed to be among the hostages.

In a possible indication of its sensitivity on the topic, the government declined to identify the type of gas used in the theater and even asserted that most of the victims died of extraneous factors such as heart attacks.

“You ask me if we used gas or not. Well, I am authorized to say that special means were used,” Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev said. “That allowed us to neutralize the kamikaze women who were strapped with explosives and held their fingers on the detonators.”

Vasilyev blamed heart conditions, stress, depression, hunger and other independent factors for the deaths. But doctors at several hospitals, before police restricted access to their facilities, said that almost none of the captives had wounds of any sort and that many were being treated for gas poisoning.

A Funny Taste

Survivors of the raid among the hostages said the last thing they remembered was feeling weak with a funny taste in their mouths, apparently caused by the knockout fumes that were pumped by police into the theater’s auditorium just before the armed forces shot their way into the building.

“They couldn’t feel it, because such gas has no smell,” Lev Fyodorov, a scientist who once worked on Soviet chemical weapons, said on Russian television.

An emergency worker quoted by Associated Press said that when he entered the hall behind the commandos, he saw everyone slumped in the seats, unconscious.

“First we thought that they were dead. Then we checked them and found that most were alive,” Vadim Mikhailov said. “Inside there was a sweltering heat and the odor of human excrement. People were in shock, starved and incapacitated.”

One hostage who was conscious, Marat Abdrakhimov, described the scene: “Soldiers around me were carrying out dozens of human bodies and putting them on the steps of the theater. Bodies lay there in piles and looked pretty lifeless. Then I noticed that someone was stirring his limbs, someone was raising a head. It was as if people were slowly coming back to their senses in the fresh, cold air.”

Politkovskaya, however, said she feared that the death toll from gas poisoning could still rise.

“Some hospitals have even prohibited relatives from contacting the hostages for the next three days,” she said. “This means that no one is sure what the consequences of the use of the nerve gas will be and how many more people will die.”

She also accused the government of using its control of the main TV networks to hide information about the gas’ effects.

“It is clear that the authorities are carefully dosing out the information that the mass media is allowed to release,” she said. “They want to wait and see how it all turns out and how many people will finally die.”

After the raid, troops began hauling unconscious hostages onto the pavement, where they were piled into ambulances and taken to hospitals to recover. A source who requested anonymity said he was told by a doctor at the scene Saturday that it was a military-issued chemical weapon that was used to render the people in the building unconscious.

No Memory

Igor Gurevich, a saxophone player for the musical who was interviewed Saturday in his hospital ward after the rescue, said groggily that he could “just remember some weirdly sweet taste in my mouth, and my head began to spin and I must have passed out.”

“I came to only here in this hospital,” he said. “I don’t remember a thing after I passed out. I don’t know whether it was gas or not, but I feel pretty rotten.”

Nikolai Marchenko, 56, said his son Andrei, 32, had survived but appeared mute at the hospital Saturday. He “can’t really say a word, just looks at me with bulging eyes,” Marchenko said. “And they didn’t let me see my wife,” also in the hospital.

Those hostages who could speak about their suffering under their captors’ grip said that the entire time from the takeover of the theater Wednesday night until their rescue Saturday morning had been an ordeal of terror. They received little food, suffered the humiliation of using the orchestra pit as a toilet and endured a chaotic last day that ended with two people shot, and, for many, passing out only to wake up in the hospital.

Fear and Farce

From the start, the hostage-takers were edgy, said Abdrakhimov, 32, a skinny actor from the “Nord-Ost” cast who looked haggard Saturday as he sat nibbling food in his production company’s office.

On the first day, he said, when two doctors were allowed into the theater, they were accused of cooperating with security forces and the rebels fired several warning shots.

“Then at some point, a grenade exploded on the first or second floor and we heard this big frightening boom,” he said.

But their captors’ behavior also had elements of farce.

“Some of the terrorists very quickly put on our ‘Nord-Ost’ T-shirts and walked around in them,” Abdrakhimov said. “Their idea of fun.”

On the second day, the hostage-takers’ commander, Movsar Barayev -- who was later killed in the rescue operation -- ran into the hall screaming in Chechen about President Bush and ordered that a large bomb that had been set in the middle of the center aisle be moved to where it could bring down the balcony to kill more people if it went off, Abdrakhimov said.

There were some moments that were more relaxed, Abdrakhimov said.

“They had a portable radio with them and portable Japanese TV, which they watched from time to time,” he explained. “Those hostages who were close then shared the televised news they caught with the others. It was also very important to help keep us going.”

Eventually, the hostages were ordered to hand over all electronic devices, including cameras, mobile phones and wristwatches, Abdrakhimov said.

“They put all the stuff they confiscated in one pile, and sometimes when they wanted they would allow some of us to use it briefly, under their control.”

Without his watch, he said, “I stopped feeling time. All of a sudden it was nine hours later, then half a day later.”

Abdrakhimov had been captured on the stage, where for his role he wore an airplane mechanic’s jacket over a 1940s military uniform. He was forced by the terrorists to come down into the auditorium and sit in the fourth row with other hostages.

“My neighbor was a stewardess, and she said that she had been through a lot of difficult situations in her work,” he said. “She once even faced some Japanese terrorists on board, and she always knew how to behave and what to do. But now she said to me, ‘I can’t do anything but stupidly sit here and wait to be killed.’ ”

At one point, Abdrakhimov said, Barayev told the hostages: “Putin will give you up. He will order a storming operation, and we will blow you all up.”

Severe Beating

By Friday night, the situation in the hall began to deteriorate, according to the account of another freed hostage, Olga Chernyak, a correspondent for the Interfax news agency who happened to be in the audience.

She said that a man covered with blood somehow made it to the theater and came into the hall. The rebels, suspicious that he was a security agent, “started beating him up severely,” Chernyak said. At that point, one of the hostages lost control of himself, “threw a bottle and then rushed right over the back of the seats in the auditorium toward the exit. And he was shouting, ‘Mother dear, I do not know what to do!’ ”

The militants fired at the fleeing hostage but hit another man in the eye and a woman in the side, both Chernyak and Abdrakhimov said. The two victims later died.

“They did not render any first aid to the people,” Chernyak said. “Instead, they began to say, ‘Everything is fine.’ And the people were shouting: ‘They are bleeding to death! Save them!’ ”

At the same time, Chernyak said, the rebels also started to claim that they had reached an agreement with Russian authorities, saying, “Everything is going according to plan. And if they fail to meet our demands, we will switch to Plan B: We will begin to execute hostages.”

At that prospect, the Chechen women “were very happy,” she said. “They saw it as a chance to go to the next world and take everybody else with them.”

The hostage-takers’ claim that negotiations were making progress eased the tension, Abdrakhimov said.

“I gradually slid down on the floor from my seat, put my head on my arms and all of a sudden fell into sleep.”

Chernyak, however, did not doze off so easily. She saw the gas.

“It was sort of bluish-gray,” she said. “There was something like a little panic among the Chechens. They started to shoot above themselves and around the perimeter, where they thought the storming groups would move in from. I do not remember anything after that. I passed out and regained consciousness only in the intensive care ward.”

While almost all the hostages were unconscious, special forces entered the hall. Television later showed many of the hostage-takers, including some of the women, sitting in their seats dead, as if they had been shot while unconscious.

Abdrakhimov said he awoke to the sound of shooting, then “suddenly somebody grabbed me firmly by the back of my collar and said: ‘Go out.’ ”

He was still dressed in his military stage uniform, and the security officers suspected that he was a terrorist even though he explained he was an actor.

“Luckily I recalled my wife’s telephone number, and they called her for confirmation,” he said. “Then they called our production office and asked me to recognize the voice of one of our managers, which I did. And only then did they let me go.”

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Sergei L. Loiko and Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.