Raid costs at least 90 lives in Moscow

MOSCOW -- Russia counted its rising toll of dead and steeled itself for new terrorist blows Saturday in its never-ending Chechen war, after commandos striking behind clouds of disabling gas brought a sudden bloody end to a hostage nightmare.

The special forces assault on a Moscow theater after a three-day siege left Russians with feelings of pain and pride: More than 90 hostages were dead, but 750 were rescued and dozens of their Chechen captors killed.

Russia "cannot be forced to its knees," President Vladimir Putin declared afterward on national television.

But the Russian leader acknowledged the heavy cost to victims' families: "We could not save everyone. Forgive us."

The key targets for the unidentified gas were almost 20 suicide attackers, Chechen women, who sat among the hostages wrapped in explosives, officials said. Had they detonated the charges, the toll of innocents would have been much higher, Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev said.

The incapacitating agent apparently was pumped into the theater through the ventilation system, Moscow's TVS television said, and then soldiers from the Alpha antiterrorist squad burst in.

Soon the hostages were brought out, most loaded unconscious onto city buses.

Government film of the aftermath showed dead female hostage-takers sitting in red plush theater seats, in black robes and veils, heads thrown back or bent over, indicating they might have been shot while unconscious. Bullet holes could be seen in their heads. One had a gas mask on.

Besides the women's explosives, the attackers had rigged other bombs throughout the hall, officials said.

"The use of special means" -- the gas -- "allowed the neutralization of the female terrorists who were wrapped in explosives and kept their fingers on the trigger," Vasilyev said.

Because only one Alpha trooper was reported wounded, some analysts believed the gas, which officials would not identify, had so incapacitated or disoriented the gunmen that they couldn't pull the triggers on their guns.

"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.

Besides 50 Chechen assailants reported killed at the theater, officials said three other gunmen were captured, and authorities searched this nervous city for accomplices and gunmen who might have escaped.

The precision terror operation that began Wednesday night in Russia's capital had defied the Kremlin's repeated contention that the nationalist rebels in predominantly Muslim Chechnya were on the verge of final defeat.

A Federal Security Service official said the well-armed theater raiders had foreign links and contacts with unspecified embassies in Moscow, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

"We can't have any euphoria," Vladimir Lukin, the deputy Parliament speaker, said after the raid. "I don't think we have broken their will."

Most surviving hostages, staggering or unconscious from the gas, were being kept from family members gathered in freezing rain outside a hospital, and their conditions were not reported.

But the death toll rose as the day stretched on. Police officials said hours after the raid that 67 hostages were killed, but the Health Ministry later said the number had risen above 90.

Despite government denials, evidence mounted that many of the hostages had died not at the hands of their captors, but from the gas used in the attack.

News reports said a number of hostages had thrown up after inhaling the gas and then had fallen unconscious, choking on their vomit. On Saturday, a doctor at one Moscow hospital told the New York Times every hostage death at his hospital was caused by suffocation.

Vasilyev, the deputy interior minister, said none of the 67 initial victims died from gas poisoning. At the same time, doctors at City Hospital No. 13, where more than 320 hostages were taken, said none of those hospitalized had gunshot wounds, TVS television reported.

Olga Chernyak, an Interfax news agency reporter caught in the hostage audience, said the gunmen killed a woman and a man "before our eyes."

"They shot the man in the eye; there was a lot of blood," Interfax quoted her as saying from her hospital bed. She said she lost consciousness soon after, apparently because of the gas.

An emergency worker who entered the hall behind the commandos said everyone he saw was slumped in their seats.

"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."

Foreign experts speculated that the gas used might have contained Valium or been a form of hallucinogenic BZ gas.

-- Information from the New York Times was used in this report.

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