THE STORM: special forces charge into the theater
Terrified that the assault on the theater had begun, Andrianova's friend used her mobile phone to call Ekho Moskvy's early morning radio show. "They are gassing us!" she screamed, her voice shrill with panic. "All the people are sitting in the hall...We beg not to be gassed!"
Taking the phone from her friend, Andrianova pleaded with the host: "We see it, we feel it, we are breathing through our clothes ... Please give us a chance. If you can do anything, please do." A moment later radio listeners heard gunshots, and then Andrianova screamed: "That's it! We are all going to be blown up. Our government has decided no one should leave here alive."
But the gas was to be her salvation — the fast-acting sleeping agent was the secret weapon in the assault by 200 of Russia's �lite Spetsnaz forces on the 50 Chechen rebels who had held more than 800 hostage in the Theater Center on Dubrovka for nearly three days. The gas, as yet unidentified, was pumped through the building's ventilation system and through holes bored in the auditorium floor by soldiers who had been tunneling beneath it since Day 1 of the standoff. As terrorists and hostages alike fell unconscious, several of the female guerrillas made a dash for the balcony but passed out before they reached the stairs.
After nearly an hour of sporadic gun battles, the Spetsnaz soldiers smashed through the theater's glass front at 6:23 a.m., and seven minutes later blew open the doors to the main hall and poured into the auditorium. In a fierce firefight, the Russian special forces gunned down those terrorists who were still awake. Those who had succumbed to the gas, including most of the women who had explosives strapped to their waists, were executed in their sleep. "Our fighters simply shot them point blank," a member of the assault team told a reporter. "It's cruel, but when a person has 2 kg of plastic explosive, we didn't see any other way of neutralizing them." The floor was littered with bombs; the largest, containing 50 kg of tnt, was planted in the middle of row 15. Fortunately, none detonated.
The battles between the soldiers and terrorists continued in other parts of the building for more than half an hour. Some of the hostages who tried to escape during the fighting were strafed by Chechens posted at the exits. The terror group's leader, 27-year-old commander Movsar Barayev, was blown away in a second-floor kitchen area.
Shortly after 7:00 a.m., the three surviving rebels surrendered and were led away. Two were said to have escaped; another was seized as he tried to slip unnoticed into a crowd of journalists.
Police later announced that they had also detained 30 "accomplices" in the area around the theater and in other parts of the city. It wasn't until some time after noon that the first estimates of the operation's grim toll became clear: more than 90 hostages had died, along with 50 rebels, but not a single Spetsnaz soldier had been killed.
A few hostages were able to stumble out of the building on their own, but most had to be carried by soldiers and emergency workers, who bundled them into waiting buses and ambulances that ferried them to hospitals across the Russian capital. Some 450 were said to have been treated. The gas attack had worked, but perhaps too well. According to press reports, some hostages in the theater had died from gas exposure. One source close to the Kremlin said the amount of sleeping agent used was five times the normal dose. "They're not saying what kind of gas they used," the source says, "but they do say that they used too much of it to be safe." Vladimir Ryabinin, a doctor at Moscow's Sklifosovsky Hospital, confirmed that 42 hostages were being treated for gas poisoning.