Writing for Prague Watchdog historian Oleg Lukin (okent@yandex.ru) brilliantly exposes more detail in the outrageous Dubrovka atrocity and coverup:

On June 1 2007 the Moscow Prosecutor's Office suspended the official inquiry into the terrorist attack on the Dubrovka theatre complex, during which Chechen guerrillas took hostage more than 900 spectators of the show “Nord-Ost”.

According to the materials of the inquiry, five of the hostages were killed directly by the terrorists, while at least 125 more died in the course of special operations to secure their release. Russian justice has fulfilled the task that was entrusted to it by the authorities: there has been no trial of those responsible for the deaths of those people. The terrorists were declared “destroyed” (with the exception of two, whose whereabouts “have not been established").

As for the question of medical assistance to the injured hostages, the investigation says that such assistance was provided in a professionally qualified and timely manner. The massive loss of life that occurred during the hostages’ release was not directly related to the use of a gas “whose nature has not been established by the inquiry”, but was due to "a combination of exceptionally unfavourable factors" (chronic illness, lack of food, dehydration, stress, and so on).

It should be borne in mind that this is the explanation supplied by the official inquiry. However, a large amount of evidence points to a conflicting version of events.

Was the gas responsible for the deaths?

Several points of view have been expressed regarding the degree of danger to the hostages posed by the gas that was used.

Thus, Professor B.M. Blokhin (Dr. med.) considers (28.9.) that the cause of death was not the toxicity of the gas, but rather an absence of the correct conditions for the transportation of the victims. The gas acted on many of the hostages like a general anaesthetic during an operation. In the situation that developed, the victims needed artificial ventilation of their lungs and the adoption of measures to prevent them swallowing their tongues (which would choke them in their unconscious state). During the evacuation of the hostages these conditions were not made available. It is also worth noting that the gas was released into the auditorium at around 5.30am, but the mass evacuation of the victims did not begin until one and a half hours later. To this must be added the time it took to get them to hospital in conditions of general confusion. The inevitable result was that a large number of hostages died even before the storming of the theatre began, something that is indirectly confirmed by the results of the official inquiry: according to it, the deaths of 114 people were certified at the scene of the incident.

The journalist Andrei Soldatov (Agentura.Ru) also believes that the use of the gas was a knowingly dangerous adventure in which the lives of the hostages were deliberately excluded from consideration. According to his data, which cites personal sources, the effects of the gas can only be neutralized by the injection of an antidote, an obviously unrealistic procedure given the huge number of victims over a short period of time.

But the true situation may perhaps have been even worse. Dmitry Milovidov, a member of the coordinating council of the “Nord-Ost” victims' organization (he is the father of 14-year-old N. Milovidova, who died in the attack) said in a program broadcast by the Ekho Moskvy radio station (“Looking for the exit”) that the gas used at the theatre centre was one that has no antidote. On this he received the indirect support of another participant in the program, Anatoly Yermolin (retired FSB lieutenant colonel and former head of the operations team of the Vympel task force), actually said the following: “’Nord-Ost’ showed us... that this gas cannot be used – that is the first conclusion I think we must draw.”

It may be objected that most of the hostages (and even a few of the spetsnaz officers) who ended up in hospital after the "gas attack", none the less survived. Does this mean that the gas was not so deadly after all? We should not forget, however, that the concentration of chemical substance in the auditorium was of varying intensity. Some of the hostages who had managed to get their bearings in the situation breathed through water-soaked garments, which also reduced the degree of toxicity. At the same time, those sitting in the first row received the highest degree of poisoning, but were evacuated last. It was probably among them that the largest number of deaths occurred.

Did the gas save anyone?

Nevertheless, supporters of the official version of what happened claim that the use of the gas saved a large number of the hostages and prevented the terrorists from blowing up the building in which they were located. But this assertion does not stand up to criticism.

The gas employed was visible, and its effect was far from instantaneous. This is borne out by the testimony both of the hostages themselves and of the spetsnaz officers who took part in the storming of the theatre complex. Even according to the official investigation, some of the guerrillas continued to hold out for some 10-20 minutes, firing from 13 sub-machine guns and 8 pistols. Moreover, this took place not only in the foyer (which the gas did not enter) but also in the auditorium itself.

That the threat to blow up the building was a very real one is borne out in particular by an interview with one of the men who took part in the storming of the theatre, Sergei Shavrin (who at the time of the events was commander of one of the assault teams):

- At headquarters level the prediction was that there would be losses, there would be dead and injured, there would be shooting, there would be an explosion, there would be a lot of casualties. But what actually happened? The storming was over, there was no explosion, and 800 or more people had to be resuscitated from the effects of the gas. It turned out that no one was prepared for this.

- So an explosion was expected?

- Yes. There were an awful lot of terrorists. One of them could have set off an explosive device.

- Then why did none of the terrorists blow themselves up? The effect of the gas wasn’t instantaneous, after all.

- When we entered the auditorium, we saw a shakhidka (female suicide bomber). She was sitting on a chair. Her eyes were open, she was holding the electrodes, all she had to do was connect them. Why she didn’t do that is unclear. Perhaps she was waiting for some instruction or command. She had enough time...

- If there had been an explosion, how many people would have survived?

- Less than 10%. But everyone knew that there was another possible scenario: that the terrorists would let the spetsnaz into the auditorium, and then someone would blow it up from outside by means of a radio signal. Then it would all be over.

There was no explosion, either from outside or inside. Indeed, the female terrorists behaved very strangely. Instead of carrying out their threat and killing themselves along with the hostages, they "made no attempt to blow themselves up, but covered their faces with headscarves and lay down on the floor among the hostages. For about 10 minutes they all lost consciousness." (see)

The question of why the terrorists did not commit suicide still remains open. The official inquiry has been unable to give an convincing answer to it. On the basis of the data available to me at this time, I am forced to conclude that an explosion was technically impossible.

Even before the theatre was stormed, an expert from Kommersant-Vlast magazine, a former KGB officer, examined the NTV footage of the guerrillas seizing the building and drew attention to one particular detail: the "suicide women” blatantly played with the wires of their devices in front of the television cameras, connecting and disconnecting the electrodes on their suicide belts. The retired officer concluded that the belts were probably not fully armed, that it was possible no batteries or detonators had been inserted into them (issue of 10.11. 02; quoted in Viktor Stepakov’s book The Battle for Nord-Ost). This theory was later confirmed, from more than one source. After the storming the journalist Andrei Soldatov wrote:

"According to our information, only two of the women actually had real explosives in their belts. Though it’s possible that even they were empty ...

Furthermore, it was determined that the bomb made from an iron cylinder containing 20 kilograms of plastic explosive was also not in working condition at the time of the assault on the building. The wire of its detonator led to the balcony. But there were no terrorists there during the assault - they were regrouping in the foyer."

Similar information was contained in an anonymous letter addressed to the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Versiya:

"I am a prosecutorial investigator who worked at Dubrovka during the terrorist attack. I would like to reply to some of the questions you raised in issue 45 (November 18-24) ...

With regard to the explosives: not all the explosives were operational. Most of them were dummies, and although the one that the women were wearing was operational, it wasn’t in working order. What’s more, all of this was known to headquarters, as audio and video of the guerrillas was coming through from surveillance devices right from the very first day. And another thing – Russian passports with return tickets were found on the bodies of the dead guerrillas, and this too was known before the assault on the building.”

Information on the use by terrorists of dummy explosive devices is confirmed in the book Brides of Allah by journalist Yuliya Yuzik, who cites an anonymous FSB lieutenant and lieutenant colonel in this connection.

The authorities have reacted rather nervously to attempts by others to make an independent inquiry. Andrei Soldatov and other Versiya journalists have repeatedly been hauled in for questioning by the FSB. Yuliya Yuzik was expelled from Chechnya with the threat that she would disappear without trace if she returned to the republic. Her book Brides of Allah was rather quickly banned for sale in Russia. (Incidentally, those who wish to can talk to the journalist in person on her Internet blog).

An impartial investigation into the Dubrovka terrorist attack and the massive loss of life that occurred during the hostages’ release is not in the interests of a large number of Russian officials, including some at the highest levels of government. However, former hostages and relatives of those who died have not given up hope of compelling the Russian officials who were responsible for what happened to testify before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The Moscow Times reports:

Relatives of hostages who died in the 2002 Dubrovka theater siege said Monday that they would press for an investigation of officials they said provided distorted information to the European Court of Human Rights. At least 129 hostages died in the attack, which began five years ago Tuesday, and the relatives said they would petition the Prosecutor General's Office to investigate officials for abusing their power and forgery in the 1,500-page response sent to the Strasbourg-based court in the government's name. "The wrong information the court has received could influence its decision," lawyer Igor Trunov, who represents victims' families in their lawsuit filed with the court, told reporters.

The families were to submit the appeal later Monday, and prosecutors will have 10 days to determine whether there are grounds to open an investigation, Trunov said. A Prosecutor General's Office spokesman said he could not immediately confirm receipt of the request. A Kremlin spokesman said he had no comment on the case. The relatives of 24 victims filed the suit with the court in April 2003 and were later joined by relatives of another 34 victims. They now have until Nov. 12 to respond to the case presented by the government, Trunov said. The court could begin hearing the case by the end of November, he said. To justify its actions during the rescue operation, Trunov said, the government underreported the number of victims who died in hospitals and exaggerated the amount of weapons and explosives carried by the 42 Chechen rebels who stormed the theater. Authorities also misinformed the court about the dangerous nature of the gas used during the rescue operation, said Tatyana Karpova, head of the Nord Ost group, who lost her son in the attack. Relatives plan to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the 56-hour standoff at 10 a.m. Friday in front of the theater.

Meanwhile, the MT unmasks the toxic gas used in the seige:

The knock-out gas that special forces pumped into Moscow's Dubrovka theater to end the hostage crisis five years ago sent baffled scientists scrambling in their laboratories in the United States and Europe. Now, five years later, the verdict is in. The mysterious substance appears to have been an FSB-made version of carfentanyl, an artificial, opium-like substance that is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and usually used to immobilize large animals. And, as it turns out, the gas wasn't really a gas at all but an aerosol -- tiny particles that float in the air. Scientists said that using the narcotic to knock out the 800 hostages and their 42 Chechen captors rather than risk a bloodbath was a wise decision, given the hopelessness of the situation. "This was quite a cunning feat," said Thomas Zilker, a toxicology professor at Munich's Technical University who examined two German survivors after the attack. He said the rescue operation after the release of the aerosol was probably to blame for most of the 129 hostage deaths. "Had they prepared themselves better for the medical aftermath, more lives could have been saved," he said.

Doctors who treated the hostages have said they worked in the dark without knowing what substance had been released in the theater to end the 56-hour siege in the early morning of Oct. 26, 2002. Government officials, who initially described the substance as a gas, still treat its contents as a state secret. But a first clue about its composition came shortly after the end of the crisis when then-Health Minister Yury Shevchenko said it was a derivative of fentanyl, an artificial opioid about 80 times more powerful than morphine. One of fentanyl's most potent derivatives is carfentanyl, which is so powerful that a tiny drop can put down an elephant.

Russian and Western scientists who have examined former hostages said their findings point to carfentanyl as the mysterious substance. Lev Fyodorov, a former Soviet chemical weapons scientist who heads the Council for Chemical Security, an environmental group, said it was probably the Federal Security Service-developed narcotic more generally known by the code name Kolokol 1, or Bell 1. Zilker, the German toxicologist, said two fentanyl derivatives were found in the urine of the German survivors he examined. He said the findings were actually made in the United States because fentanyl metabolizes quickly and the traces had already been too faint for any European laboratory to detect. Zilker said he could not reveal the names of the derivatives. "I had to promise [the U.S. authorities] not to publish the results," he said in a telephone interview. He said earlier reports that his team had found traces of halothane, a widely used inhaled anesthetic, were erroneous because of a glitch in his laboratory. "Some of our test tubes had contained traces of halothane from earlier use," he said.

Paul Wax, a top U.S. toxicologist, said the U.S. government had decided to keep its findings classified. But he agreed that carfentanyl was the most likely answer. "It is very intriguing because it possesses the ideal properties," he said by telephone from Paradise Valley, Arizona. He called the agent ideal because it floats in the air and requires only a miniscule amount to get quick results. The Chechen hostage takers fell asleep so fast that they had no time to fire their weapons or detonate their bombs. Spraying an aerosol is complicated, because it does not spread evenly like a gas. But the special forces were aided by the layout of the theater hall. "They just used the ventilation system, which was very strong because the hall was very big," Fyodorov said in an interview in his apartment in southern Moscow. The agent, he said, originated from a generator placed in a space between the hall and the building's roof. Emergency response workers picking up unconscious hostages at the theater were ordered to inject them with naloxone, a widely used opioid antagonist. All the hostages brought to at least one city hospital responded to naloxone.

But for many hostages, help came too late. Doctors had not been told what agent the hostages had inhaled, leaving them guessing how to treat their patients. Also, the unconscious people were rushed to hospitals in ordinary buses, many of them placed in seats or on the floor. Fyodorov pointed out that when the Alfa special forces stormed the theater, they focused first on shooting dead the unconscious captors instead of helping the hostages. "There were no paramedics, no emergency ministry officials in the room," he said. "This was a case of gigantic unprofessionalism." He said the use of a chemical agent was "utterly outside international and national law."

No officials were charged after the rescue operation, and an investigation by the Prosecutor General's Office was suspended after a year. The prosecutor's office declined immediate comment about the case. The Kremlin has long maintained that the rescue effort was handled properly. [LR: The Kremlin also thinks Stalin was "proper"] "All special forces involved in the operation acted in strict accordance with Russian and international law," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday. He said the special forces officers had been "ready to die to save the hostages."

Fyodorov suggested that authorities used the agent again in October 2005, when they crushed an insurgency by Islamic militants in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria. An Associated Press reporter noted at the time that troops fired gas grenades that caused at least one hostage to lose consciousness as they began storming a building where the insurgents were holding hostages. Doctors later said the hostages were suffering from the effects of an unspecified, nonlethal gas. Peskov said he had never heard allegations that a chemical agent was used in Nalchik.

While morally dubious, the handling of the Dubrovka crisis could probably be justified under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Moscow signed in 1997, said Jan van Aken, the Hamburg-based director of the Sunshine Project, an international nongovernmental organization against the use of chemical and biological weapons. The convention explicitly allows the use of chemical weapons for law enforcement, including domestic riot control purposes. "They just need to argue that the siege was a domestic crisis and no act of war," van Aken said. After the siege, the government sent a letter to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons explaining its actions, the organization's spokesman, Peter Kaiser, said via telephone from The Hague. He said he was not authorized to discuss the contents of the letter. Van Aken called Dubrovka a prime example of how nonlethal chemical weapons should be avoided in both warfare and anti-terrorist operations. He said people react differently to temporarily incapacitating agents like fentanyl and that the agents needed to be delivered in individual doses. "It is in the nature of biochemistry that some will always suffer fatal results. Even under the best clinical conditions, an anesthesiologist's patients sometimes die," van Aken said. "With the use of hand grenades in the same situation, the mortality rate would statistically not have been higher," he added.

With 129 fatalities out of 800 people, the Dubrovka death rate was about 16 percent. In comparison, a grenade attack typically results in 10 percent fatalities, according to a report published in the World Journal of Surgery in 1992.

A 2003 study by U.S. scientists Lynn Klotz, Martin Furmanski and Mark Wheelis found that even the most effective incapacitating agent could be expected to result in 10 percent fatalities. "Genuinely nonlethal chemical weapons are beyond the reach of current science," the study said.

The Moscow Times reports on yet another skeleton in "President" Vladimir Putin's closet, yet another facet of the neo-Soviet horror of Dubrovka:

When Svetlana Gubareva woke up in the intensive care ward of a Moscow hospital, one of the first things she heard was President Vladimir Putin offering condolences to the families of the 129 hostages who died in the Dubrovka theater. Gubareva wondered what had happened to her fiance, a U.S. citizen, and 13-year-old daughter, who like herself was from Kazakhstan. But Putin did not utter a word about the foreign victims of the 56-hour stand-off, which began five years ago this Tuesday when 42 Chechen rebels stormed the theater in southeastern Moscow during a performance of the "Nord Ost" musical.

The omission would have been insignificant if it were not for the fact that it encapsulates the way that authorities have blithely ignored the foreigners taken hostage in the attack, refusing to assist them in any way or even offer them the small compensation handed out to Russian citizens, Gubareva and others said.

The government says 75 foreigners were among the 800 hostages. Nine foreigners died in the attack, including Gubareva's daughter, Sasha Letyago, and her fiance, Sandy Booker, of Oklahoma City. No government representative broke the news to Gubareva. While in the hospital, she found out from media reports that they had died. Still later, she learned from media reports and people who had helped identify her daughter's body that the girl had been crushed to death as she was sent by bus to the hospital under a pile of unconscious bodies.

Gubareva said she struggled alone after losing the two. No assistance came from Russian authorities, her hometown of Karaganda or the Kazakh steel mill where she worked. Hundreds of sympathetic letters, however, poured into her mailbox from the United States, offering much-needed support, she said. "They were my psychotherapists because I did not have any professionals nearby and did not know how to go on," she said in a telephone interview from Karaganda, Kazakhstan. The only financial assistance came from a Pennsylvania-based foundation set up by U.S. citizen Andrew Mogilyansky to help terrorism victims.

Gubareva said her life was filled with joy in the months before Dubrovka. She met Booker, a 49-year-old electrical engineer, through a friend, and after many e-mails and telephone calls made plans to fly with her daughter to Oklahoma City to live there permanently as a family. An interview at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow went well, and she was told she and her daughter would get visas. To celebrate, Gubareva, her daughter and Booker went to watch "Nord Ost" on the night of Oct. 23, a Wednesday. The second act of the musical had just begun with "The Dance of the Pilots" when a masked man charged onto the stage, shooting an automatic rifle in the air. "I thought at first that it was a bad joke, but Sandy immediately understood what was going on," Gubareva said. She saw a group of men with assault rifles drive the actors off the stage and force musicians from the orchestra pit and ushers into the audience. Booker cautioned the two to keep their heads down if shooting broke out. He prayed a lot, but at times he looked as if he had accepted the possibility that he would not make it out of the theater alive, Gubareva said.

Rebel leader Movsar Barayev told the hostages from the start that the attack was part of the battle over Chechnya and that the rebels had no grudge against foreigners. He promised to release anyone who showed a foreign passport. Government negotiators, however, were reluctant to accept the offer to release the foreigners, saying they wanted women and children to be freed first. "Furthermore, we insist that everybody be released, without any distinction between foreigners and Russians," FSB spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko said Oct. 25, the third day of the crisis, RIA-Novosti reported. Gubareva, her daughter and Booker had no passports to show anyway. Booker had left his passport back at the hotel, while Gubareva's and her daughter's passports were at the U.S. Embassy awaiting visas. Booker, however, had his Oklahoma driver's license, and he handed it over to Barayev, Gubareva said. Barayev apparently had never seen one before and he examined it carefully. He did not let Booker or anyone else out that first night. "We won't let you go today, only tomorrow. I do not want your own people to shoot you and say later that we killed you. That's what happened at Budyonnovsk," he said, according to Gubareva.

In June 1995, Chechen rebels seized a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, taking more than 1,500 people hostage. More than 100 civilians died in the standoff.

Gubareva said she feared for her daughter's life from the very beginning. When Sasha asked permission to go to the theater's restroom, she had to cross the foyer, putting her in the sights of Chechen gunmen who were covering the exits. Later, so many people were demanding to visit the restroom that the attackers ordered them to use the orchestra pit instead. The stench slowly made its way through the theater, Gubareva said, but a broken window in the foyer provided some relief. The captors freed 15 children under the age of 12 in the first hours of the siege, but Sasha, at 13, was too old. The girl soon grew hungry and thirsty, Gubareva said. The attackers brought some food from the theater snack bars and distributed it among the hostages. They also brought along a box of cash and asked the hostages, "Who needs money?"

"We all remained silent, and they threw the box on the floor," Gubareva said. She said she later saw the money in the orchestra pit, used and discarded as toilet paper. Gubareva said she was too scared to eat but was very thirsty. Bottles of Fanta, Cola-Cola and mineral water from the snack bars ran out quickly, and hostages were offered tap water from the restroom. The problem was solved on the third day, Oct. 25, when investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya convinced the attackers to allow the delivery of water canisters, Gubareva said. Politkovskaya, who was murdered last year, had rushed to Moscow from an awards ceremony in Los Angeles when the captors indicated that they would like her to act as a mediator. In the theater, all the hostages avoided sitting next to an enormous bomb placed in the ninth row, leaving a large circle of empty seats around it, Gubareva said. A female suicide bomber told Gubareva that it was "stupid behavior."

"The bomb will not hurt some people more than others. There's enough here to destroy three buildings." she said. Gubareva said she saw a mother with children in the theater's balcony. The children were released, but the mother was told to stay. "I saw her crying and begging Barayev: "Yassir, they are little. They do not know their way in the city, and they will get lost." The hostages addressed Barayev as "Yassir," a polite form of address, after hearing the other captors address him this way, Gubareva said. Barayev finally let the woman leave with her children, she said. The captors did not allow loud conversation or movements around the hall, so the theater was eerily quiet except for the shooting, she said. The Chechens shot at the doorways every time they heard a rustle outside. At one point, a young man near the back row got up and started to jump over the backs of the seats, and shots were fired directly into the hall, wounding a woman. Her husband's shriek at the moment she was shot was terrifying, Gubareva said. He was crying, "Liza, my daughter, they have killed Mommy!" But the woman was alive, and a female hostage with a relative in the Red Cross was given back her cell phone to ask a doctor to visit. "It was an accident, and as far as I know they did not kill any hostages on purpose," Gubareva said.

About seven hours after seizing the theater, the rebels did kill a 26-year-old Moscow woman who had somehow entered the theater. On the last night of the siege, Oct. 25, Barayev ordered the rebels to separate the Russian and foreign hostages into two groups. A total of 75 were counted as foreigners, and since Gubareva's documents were at the U.S. Embassy, she and her daughter were initially identified as Americans. "They gave Sandy a phone so that he could call the American Embassy and get them to send a representative from the embassy the next day," Gubareva said. An agreement was finally made with the U.S. and Kazakh embassies for their release at 8 a.m. on Oct. 26, she said.

Gubareva recalled Barayev announcing to the hostages that negotiations would finally begin at 10 or 11 a.m. on Oct. 26. "He said that everyone could relax until then, because there would be no assault until negotiations began," she said. The hostages settled down to sleep, Gubareva said. The last time she saw her daughter and Booker was at 3:20 a.m. "They were asleep in each other's arms," she said. Gubareva also fell asleep, only to wake up in the intensive care ward at Hospital No. 7. All the hostages and rebels fell unconscious at around 5:30 a.m. when special forces pumped a mysterious gas into the theater and then stormed it. The gas knocked out the attackers and the hostages without a shot being fired or a bomb detonating.

A U.S. Embassy representative officially notified Gubareva about Booker's death two days later, on Oct. 28. When she went to the morgue to identify him the next day, doctors told her that he had died after not being treated for complications from the gas. Gubareva -- and many other former hostages and their relatives -- firmly believe that many lives could have been saved if the rescue effort had been better prepared. "We insist that there was a real mess when the dead bodies were being transported to hospitals, with live people mixed with dead bodies to die with no medical assistance," said Tatyana Karpova, head of Nord Ost, a nongovernmental organization. Her son died in the attack. She said a state investigation into the death found that a contributing factor was "the absence of a specific antidote to the substance that was used" to gas the theater. Prosecutors, however, decided not to bring charges against health-care workers or special service officers, despite complaints filed by relatives.

In a decision made almost a year after the attack, prosecutors concluded that the deaths were "caused by a combination of unfavorable factors that were dangerous to life and health ... and by respiratory disorders caused by the action of the unidentified chemical substance." The decision also blamed the attackers, saying, "They refused to release children and foreigners as they had previously agreed to." The decision was not immediately released to the public, and Gubareva and the other relatives only obtained access to it through a court order. Gubareva said the attackers did not break any agreements. Her conclusion is at least partially supported by Kazakhstan's former ambassador to Russia, Altynbek Sarsenbayev. "We agreed that the release of the Kazakh citizens would be at 8 in the morning, but we did not know that there would be an assault that night," he said on the Kazakh television program "The Condition of KZ" on Oct. 26, 2003. Gubareva lost a final appeal to open a criminal case into the rescue operation in 2005. The court also refused to compensate her for the loss of her daughter. "I do not know why the court refused all the applications of foreigners," said Igor Trunov, the lawyer for Gubareva and three other foreigners who lost relatives.

Most Russian citizens accepted small government-ordered compensations, said Karpova, who lost her son. She said she was offered 615 rubles (about $25) a month but refused to take it. "The amount was just insulting," she said. Booker's relatives did not want to seek legal action in Russia, Gubareva said. Some relatives, however, have turned to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which is now considering their appeal. Karpova said she had received a copy of the Russian government's reply to an inquiry from Strasbourg. "They say that everything was done just fine and everyone who needed help got it," Karpova said.

She is sure, however, that the court will not agree.

Gubareva plans to commemorate her daughter's death this Oct. 26 as she does almost every year -- at her graveside in Moscow's Troyekurovskoye Cemetery. Politkovskaya is buried not far away. "She always dreamed about living in this city. That's why I buried her there, not in Karaganda," Gubareva said. She has never visited Booker's grave, however.

She said the United States is too far away.

The Times of London reports:

A young Chechen who tried to negotiate the release of hostages during the Moscow theatre siege five years ago, only to be arrested on terrorism charges and imprisoned in the Arctic, has said he was drugged by the Russian security service so that it could claim to have caught one of the perpetrators.

Zaur Talkhigov, 30, is half way through his eight-and-a-half-year sentence. He vehemently rejects claims by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, that he was an accomplice of the Chechen terrorists who took more than 800 theatre-goers hostage.

Independent observers who attended his trial insist that the charges were trumped up and his lawyer is taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Last week he said that FSB agents who had used him to pass messages to the hostage-takers, drugged him before detaining him. Since his arrest he has been moved 15 times between different prisons, he says.

According to Talkhigov, he has been severely beaten by guards. At one point he was held for a year in solitary confinement. He has caught hepatitis C, apparently after doctors used an infected needle on him.

“I still cannot believe I am living this nightmare,” he said. “For four years and eight months I’ve been kept behind bars for absolutely no reason. I’m 100% innocent. I tried to help release some of the hostages. No one knows this better than the FSB officers who were there. They arrested me and put me on trial so that they could claim to have arrested one of the terrorists.”

Talkhigov is now in a cramped cell with 18 inmates sharing one lavatory in Komi, a remote and forbidding region that became infamous under Stalin for its many forced-labour camps. In winter, temperatures drop to -30C. In summer, the cell is a stifling 30C plus.

He is allowed out of his cell for just an hour a day and permitted to wash once a month. The food consists of buckwheat porridge, rancid fishbone soup and the occasional plate of boiled meat.

His mother Tamara can visit him only once a year, for three days. The return train journey to the prison from her home in Chechnya takes 84 hours.

“Conditions in the prison where I am now are relatively good,” said Talkhigov. “In Moscow I was held in a cell so cramped that we took it in turns to sleep. Tuberculosis was rampant. In another prison, where I was held in solitary confinement, two guards came into my cell shortly after I arrived and beat me all over my body with their truncheons as their way of welcoming me. I’ve been under constant psychological pressure.”

Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless investigative reporter who was murdered by a gunman last year, believed in his innocence and wrote about his case. She argued that he was framed by the security service, which after failing to prevent the terrorist attack was anxious to demonstrate some success.

“From day one Talkhigov’s case was about finding him guilty,” she wrote. “His guilt appears to be that he spoke to Chechens inside the building to negotiate the release of some foreign hostages.”

Talkhigov, who worked as a meat wholesaler, went to the scene of the Moscow theatre siege out of curiosity on the second day of the stand-off between the Kremlin and 40 heavily armed Chechens.

There he met Aslambek Aslakhanov, a Chechen member of parliament, who at the time was an adviser to President Vladimir Putin. Aslakhanov allowed Talkhigov to pass through police cordons to an emergency headquarters set up by the FSB’s antiterrorism branch less than 200 yards from the theatre. By his own admission, Aslakhanov gave him a mobile phone and a number for Movsar Barayev, the leader of the hostage-takers.

With permission from the FSB, he asked Talkhigov to ring the terrorists in the hope of establishing a line of communication that could be used to secure the release of women and children.

“They were desperate to establish contact with the hostage-takers and thought that as a Chechen, who speaks the language but is not linked to the security services, I’d have a better chance,” said Talkhigov.

“I spoke to the Chechens many times. I knew the phone calls were being listened in to and after each call I was debriefed by the FSB, which took detailed notes.”

At first the Chechens reacted angrily to Talkhigov’s calls. In an effort to win their trust, he told them to be careful because there were snipers and armed personnel carriers outside.

“It was a general comment, nothing specific and I knew perfectly well that the FSB was listening,” he said. “All I wanted was to help release a few hostages.”

The next day, as Talkhigov was trying to negotiate the release of foreign captives, he was led into a room by several FSB officers.

“They started shouting at me, pushed me around and accused me of being one of the terrorists. One guy cocked his gun and threatened to shoot me.”

Another FSB officer offered him a glass of orange juice. Within minutes of drinking it the young Chechen became incapacitated. “I had no idea of what was going on,” he said. “I was in a trance and to this day I have memory loss.” He woke up in a prison cell.

The siege ended after three days when Russian security forces pumped gas into the theatre. They stormed the building and killed all the terrorists. Some 130 hostages also died.

Most of the victims perished as a result of the emergency services’ slow response in the aftermath. Relatives of the dead are still demanding that prosecutors investigate those in charge of the rescue operation.

At his trial, which was held behind closed doors, prosecutors who accused Talkhigov of being an accomplice produced only the recording in which he mentioned the snipers and personnel carriers. All other evidence, including the debriefing notes and other recordings, had been destroyed, the prosecutors claimed.

While the siege was underway, I met Talkhigov in the emergency headquarters. He told me Barayev’s number, which he had clearly been given by the FSB.

Eventually, I was able to enter the theatre and interview Barayev, but Talkhigov declined to accompany me: he feared the Chechens would not trust him.

“At first I thought this was just a big mistake,” said Talkhigov. “Then I realised that they had decided to let me hang. I still can’t believe this happened to me. I wanted to help and got nearly nine years in jail. I still dream that somehow the truth will come out and that the state will accept that I was framed. I’m innocent.”

The Moscow Times reports that many relatives of the Dubrovka massacre believe that the Kremlin is just as responsible for their loss as the Chechens, and they are taking brave action to defend themselves:

Relatives of those who died in the Dubrovka hostage-taking in 2002 urged the Prosecutor General's Office on Wednesday to investigate whether senior officials were responsible for the deaths. The relatives also recounted horror stories of loved ones who died hours after being rescued from the Moscow theater. "We have documents proving that the storming and the improper organization of medical aid to the hostages actually killed our children," said Tatyana Karpova, head of the Nord Ost victims' committee who lost her son in the attack. "Nord Ost" was the musical playing when the theater was seized Oct. 23, 2002.

A total of 130 hostages died, most from the effects of an unknown gas that special forces pumped into the theater to knock out the Chechen attackers and their captives. No officials have been charged over the rescue operation that ended a three-day standoff. Karpova told reporters that the relatives had filed an appeal with prosecutors to investigate the actions of Vladimir Pronichev, a deputy director of the Federal Security Service who headed the rescue operation; General Alexander Tikhonov, head of the FSB's special operations center; and FSB director Nikolai Patrushev, among others. Karpova said a lack of medical care was to blame for at least 69 of the deaths, including that of her son Alexander, 31, whom she said lay among the unconscious and dead bodies of hostages on a bus for seven hours before he died.

A 13-year-old girl, Kristina Kurbatova, arrived at the hospital unconscious, was declared dead, and was put in a morgue refrigerator, her father wrote on a "Nord Ost" relatives web site. The father said that he came to the hospital the next day, and when he asked a doctor to establish the cause of death, the temperature of the body indicated that the girl had died in the morgue. Another girl, Nina Milovidova, 14, died of asphyxiation while being transported to the hospital on the floor of a bus under the bodies of other hostages, her father, Dmitry Milovidov, said alongside Karpova at the news conference Wednesday. "We will never forgive Putin for their deaths," he said. He said he and other relatives have sent a letter to President Vladimir Putin that reads in part: "You noticed that one protester in Estonia died because no medical attention was provided, but why don't you care about the 130 who died for the same reason in Moscow in 2002?"

The government has sharply criticized Estonia for the stabbing death of a Russian citizen during violent riots that broke out in late April in Tallinn over the relocation of a Soviet war memorial. A spokesman for the Prosecutor General's Office, Alexander Vasiliyev, said Wednesday that prosecutors would review the appeal, but he could not say what action, if any, they would take. A years-long investigation by the prosecutor's office into the theater attack has been suspended -- meaning investigators are no longer actively looking into the case but relatives are not allowed to review any of their findings. Milovidov and Karpova expressed concern that authorities had not learned from past mistakes, noting that Pronichev was sent to the scene of the Beslan school hostage-taking in 2004 to assist in the rescue operation there. More than 330 hostages died, most as special forces moved in to end a three-day standoff.

No senior officials have been charged over Beslan. "We submitted our complaint not to take revenge on them but to protect people from their mistakes in the future," Karpova said.

Writing in the Moscow Times, hero journalist Yulia Latynina (pictured) sums up the bleak prospects of the Dubrovka "investigation."

The Prosecutor General's Office has suspended its investigation into the 2002 Dubrovka theater siege. The announcement came at an opportune moment for the prosecutor general -- the day after Andrei Lugovoi's news conference concerning murder charges filed against him in Britain in the poisoning of former Federal Security Service officer Alexander Litvinenko -- and therefore went almost unnoticed.

Unlike the 2004 terrorist attack in Beslan, the Dubrovka crisis was the subject of little official investigation. Beslan is in the Caucasus, Dubrovka in Moscow. In Beslan, the victims huddled together in the gymnasium of School No. 1 were all relatives and acquaintances, while in the Moscow theater each hostage was a separate member of the capital's fragmented society. Entire families and clans are calling for a complete investigation in Beslan, but the only people still pushing for an investigation of Dubrovka are Tatyana Karpova, the chairwoman of the Nord-Ost victims' committee, Svetlana Gubareva, one of the victims, and their lawyer, Karina Moskalenko.

Instead of an investigation into the way security forces handled the Dubrovka hostage rescue, we got only an interview with Igor Trunov, the lawyer who first represented the victims' families, regarding his fight for damages against the Moscow government. Only when Moskalenko took over from Trunov did she assemble the necessary information to determine that 174 people died in the rescue attempt, and not the officially announced total of 129. Can you imagine the reaction if the count was off by even one victim in Beslan?

The Dubrovka assault was unique in that it was successful, but the aftermath botched. The use of gas and storming the hall went fine. Most of the deaths occurred because the security forces laid hostages dragged out of the theater on their backs, and many choked to death on their own tongues. Laying them facedown would have saved many.

No one can say whether the decision to use the gas was the right one, but using an experimental variant definitely raised the risk of unknown side effects. Without the gas, there was a chance the terrorists could have blown up the building and everyone inside. It's hard to pick the best option. A person with gangrene can't complain if a doctor amputates his or her leg, as only the doctor knows whether it had to be done to save a life.

The only way to come to a conclusion on the gas is to conduct an open investigation of every action taken and order given. But no such investigation was ever performed. Rather than trying to determine what, if any, mistakes were made so as to avoid repeating them, the authorities effectively said, "We made no mistakes."

As it turns out, the authorities had an entirely free hand in the affair. They were free to reject negotiating with the terrorists by falsely claiming that the hostage-takers refused to communicate. They were free to under-report the number of hostages as 350, rather than the actual number of over 700, thereby diminishing the number of lives for which they -- and the terrorists -- would be held accountable. Killing terrorists appears to have been more important than saving hostages.

Hostage-taking incidents are typically directed at democratic governments. By seizing ordinary people, the terrorists put the government in an impossible position: It can either comply with their ' demands or kill innocent people in the process of taking out their attackers. It would be pointless for terrorists to seize hostages in a dictatorship, as dictators traditionally don't value the lives of their citizens much more than those of, for example, insects.

As a result, I will go out on a limb by suggesting hostage-takings by terrorists are now a thing of the past -- bombings perhaps, but no hostage taking. If hostage-takers are an illness to which only democracies are prone, then Russia appears to have built up an immunity.