took her from the hall into an adjacent room and fired four bullets into her with a 5.45-mm assault rifle. The bullets penetrated the right half of her rib cage, abdomen, lungs, and left hip bone as she crumpled to the ground, and she was soon dead. It was rumored among the hostages that she had been drunk or on drugs. Others claimed that she might have been an FSB agent. Romanova was the first casualty of the siege.
Back in the main auditorium, the terrorists used the hostages' passports and other forms of identification to separate the foreign hostages from the Russians. They also separated the men from the women. The hostages were split between the main stalls and the balcony. Virtually no contact between the groups was allowed. The terrorists also checked IDs to determine how many police officers or federal agents might be among the crowd. Accounts differ as to what happened next. According to one story, police officers and agents were shot; according to another, after the siege it was found that no agents had been killed. All Muslims, Azeris, and Georgians in the audience were told that they were free to leave, as were those holding foreign passports. Seventy-five people from fourteen different countries were told to go, but then the Russian police negotiators refused to let the crowd be divided along ethnic lines. The Russian authorities did permit the terrorists to release 150 women and children and some of the foreigners, especially those who required medical treatment after the first few hours of the siege. One pregnant Russian suffering from dehydration and anxiety was taken to a local hospital.
The siege became a tense standoff and the hours turned into days as the Russians pretended to negotiate with the hostage-takers. Shortly after midnight on day three, a group of Russian doctors, including Dr. Leonid Roshal, head of the Moscow Institute of Emergency Children's Surgery, entered the theater with several NTV reporters to treat the sick and wounded. Most hostages just needed cough medicine or eyedrops. Roshal reported that the rebels were not beating or threatening any of the captives. Most of the hostages were calm; only two or three needed tranquilizers. The Red Cross also brought in hot food, warm clothes, and medicine.
According to Movsar's father, as part of the negotiations, Vladimir Putin promised to come to the theater. The Kremlin also promised to send General Viktor Kazantsev, a former commander of the Chechen war who wasn't even in Moscow, to negotiate terms.25 Hoping that a peaceful agreement could be negotiated, Barayev ordered the men to disable the bombs in the auditorium and to take the batteries out of the handheld detonators, so that there would be no accidental explosions. In fact, there were no negotiations in the works. The terrorists had been duped. In the final hours before the security forces took over, the rebels were informed that the Russians would concede to their demands, a lie that appears to have persuaded the Chechens to relax their defences. Russian special forces then leaked information to the media that they planned to storm the theater at three in the morning. Barayev and his men waited for two hours for the assault but nothing happened. They let their guard down again, assuming the tip to have been a hoax.
At 5:00 A.M. members of the Russian Spetsnaz (special-purpose troops) stormed the theater. Shortly before, they had accessed the ventilation system of the building through the gay club Central Station located next door. Inside the theater, the hostages heard a hissing sound like the noise a gas stove makes when you first turn it on. Immediately people felt their senses dulling and started to feel woozy and nauseated. The symptoms were those of classic opium poisoning: dilated pupils, vomiting, loss of consciousness, and eventual asphyxiation from a lack of oxygen. Many of the hostages took the smell to be smoke from a fire, but it soon became apparent that gas was being pumped into the building. Some of the terrorists yelled, “Gas! Gas!” and commanded the women to turn off the air-conditioning. Some of the hostage-takers had gas masks, which they put on. Most of the rest soon lost consciousness.
One of the hostages, Anna Andrianova, who worked for the daily Moskovskaya Pravda, called the Echo of Moscow radio show at the outset of the FSB's assault. She told listeners: “The government forces are pumping gas into the hall. Please, give us a chance. If you can do anything!” She did not know what the gas was but from the terrorists' reactions she believed that they did not want the hostages to die. The same could not be said of the Russian authorities, who did not seem to want anyone to survive the ordeal. Andrianova screamed: “We see it, we feel it, we are breathing it through our clothes…Our government has decided that no one should leave from here alive.”26
After nearly one and a half hours of sporadic gun battles while they waited for the gas to take effect, the Russian special forces blew open the doors to the main hall and poured into the auditorium. They threw in noise and light grenades to disorient the terrorists. When the shooting began, the rebels told their hostages to lean forward in their seats and cover their heads. Movsar was holed up in a windowless room, so the gas did not affect him.27 The FSB's Alpha Group—a specialized counter-terrorism squad—gunned down the terrorists who were still conscious and systematically executed those who had passed out. Soldiers walked around the auditorium and shot each of the women terrorists in the head. Their orders had been to take no chances. The subdued Chechens were summarily executed at point-blank range. Even if the soldiers saw batteries in the women's hands and empty detonators, indicating that the women's bombs had been disarmed, they ignored this sight and killed the Chechens anyway.
The only hostages who recovered from the gas were the ones who received naloxone, a treatment for opium overdose, within the first few hours of the attack. The gas must have been extremely potent to knock out so many people, especially the Chechen captors, who were young and in good physical shape. Observers identified the gas as fentanyl, but it would have taken tons of regular fentanyl to do the job. Some derivatives of the drug, such as 3-methylfentanyl, might have been used instead. The Russian health minister, Yuri Shevchenko, later said that the FSB had used an opiate derivative of fentanyl that was most likely carfentanyl, produced by taking the basic fentanyl molecule and adding carbon to it, making the drug eighty to a hundred times stronger. Carfentanyl is not intended for use on humans; it is normally used by vets to tranquilize bison or elephants. Lev Fyodorov, a Russian toxicologist, told the Russian newspaper Gazeta that the gas was probably produced in a secret laboratory in the Lubyanka, the FSB's headquarters. The Russians have consistently refused to disclose precisely which gas they actually used.28
A correspondent from the London newspaper The Guardian saw the bodies being pulled out of the theater, “their faces waxy, white and drawn, eyes open and blank.”29 Soon, the street in front of the theater was filled with the bodies of the dead and those unconscious from the gas but still alive. Just seventeen doctors confronted almost a thousand casualties. Within minutes they were completely overwhelmed. Few ambulances were standing by and city buses were brought in. It took the commandos more than an hour to evacuate the theater, during which time many of the hostages died. The soldiers, inexperienced in first aid, dragged people outside and piled them up like sacks. Many of the victims choked to death on their own vomit or swallowed their own tongues.
The hostages' coats were in the theater's cloakroom and they had no outside clothing to protect them from the elements; it was a snowy night and many of them suffered from exposure when they were left unattended in the street. There were reports that members of the security services and police rummaged through their pockets, helping themselves to the victims' money and jewels.30 Rescue workers on the scene had not brought enough naloxone for everyone. The stricken hostages got no relief when they were transferred to the local hospitals, where staff were expecting to treat victims of explosions and gunshot wounds, not victims of an unknown chemical agent.
The following day, the surviving hostages found themselves under virtual house arrest. The FSB posted armed guards at the hospitals and doctors were ordered not to release anyone in case some of the militants were hiding among them. Families panicked as the government refused to release any information about which hospitals were treating the casualties or to disclose the names of those who had died. The official number of the dead rose by the hour while the government maintained the fiction that the assault had been launched when the rebels started executing captives. The final body count was 41 terrorists killed31 and 129 hostages dead as a result of the gas and
