Children and Muslims released:
- Up to 30 gunmen seized a Moscow theater staging a musical late Wednesday, firing shots in the air and holding a number of people hostage, police and news agencies said.
Interfax news agency, one of whose reporters was in the theater at the time, said the gunmen had let members of the audience make phone calls and allowed children to be released.
Muslim members of the audience attending the production of "North-East" were also allowed to leave, Interfax said. Police said they had as yet received no demands from the gunmen. Reports put the number of gunmen in the theater between 20 and 30.
Elite police teams rushed to the scene but there were no initial reports of casualties. Police said they believed up to 700 people were attending the show but exact numbers remained unclear.
The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin had been informed of the incident, which happened on the eve of his official visit to Europe.
UPDATE
An update from Reuters:
- Up to 30 armed men and women, apparently Chechens and wearing masks, seized hundreds of people in a Moscow theater late on Wednesday and threatened to blow it up if police stormed the building, witnesses and police said.
Officials refused to say who was behind the attack, but witness accounts pointed to an attack by Chechen separatist guerrillas.
If the armed gang proves to be Chechen, the Moscow hostage-taking incident would be the most audacious such attack since the first Chechen war of 1994 to 1996.
A teenager released by the gang told Russian television that the armed gang wanted "the war to be stopped," an apparent reference to the long-running secessionist war in Russia's turbulent Chechnya province.
The teenager, among youngsters immediately released by the hostage-takers, said the group of 20-30 attackers had burst into the theater, which was showing the musical "North-East," one firing a burst of bullets into the ceiling.
"He told all the actors to sit down on the front rows. Then women and men came in with masks.
"Some women were strapped with explosives and they said they would blow up the whole building in 10 minutes if they (police) started to storm the building," Denis Afanasyev, a teenager told Russian television.
Another student called Alexei, also released, said the Chechens who burst in shouted out: "Release Chechnya and Russia from Russians. Stop the war in Chechnya."
Article comments
1 - John Tobin
You may want to include what the Russians are saying about this. Check out http://english.pravda.ru/
Moscow: Chechen terrorists take theatre
Chechen kamikaze squad take theatre with 1,000 hostages in Moscow
A group of between 20 and 30 kamikaze Chechen terrorists stormed a packed Moscow theatre tonight, threatening to blow the building up unless their demands are met. It is feared that due to the fact that their demands are unrealistic, they will prefer to become martyrs, rather than prisoners. ....
2 - Eric Olsen
Excellent John, thanks. You kind of figured the Russians wouldn't hesitate to characterize the situation as such.
3 - Tom
So do the Russkies continue to oppose us on Iraq, or do we team up and get to work on removing this blight once and for all? And when we're done with the filthy French, we can go after the Islamofacists
4 - Michael Levy
The headline over at The Guardian is "Muslim Peace Activists Detain Russian Theatergoers in Mass Protest"
Okay, I made that up. But it's almost believable.
5 - RC
Why such an increase in activity (Bali, Moscow, Phillippines) when it would appear such terrorist activity would bring more allies to our side? These nutjobs need a course in game theory or marketing or something.
One thing though. Were any of us calling the Chechens 'terrorists' prior to 9/11? Probably not. I think most American right/left-wingers thought the Moscow apartment bombings were some sort of Russian conspiracy to allow Putin to re-invade Chechnya.
Actually, considering this country's isolationist bent at the time, most of us probably didn't really care.
6 - pj
It does cause me to rethink my view of Russian's war in Chechnya, particularly the second war. If I were the Russians, I'd pump the theater full of carbon monoxide, which is odorless and invisible, then drag out the hostages and try to revive them with oxygen. The "mining" activity described in news reports might make that impossible though, because you'd have to move very quickly after everyone passed out to save the hostages.
7 - David Gillies
I certainly thought of the Chechen separatists as terrorists long before 9/11. As far as I'm concerned we should give Russia a free hand to deal with the problem in as brutal a fashion as they see fit.
8 - Thomas Dent
Does anyone here know any Chechen/Russian history? Does it make no difference at all that Russia/USSR has treated the people there like shit since the Russian invasion and conquest of the land a century and a half ago? In this case, as in the case of Ireland post potato famine, "root causes" demonstrably exist and have little to do with religious fanaticism.
If you have a little time to read history, try
http://www.newsbee.net/moscow/chhistory.html
in which you will find the elegant solution of Stalin to the "Islamic fundamentalists" of his day (i.e. Muslims who resisted his authority): deport the whole population hundreds of miles away. Compared to the Russian war in 1995, that was pretty humane.
9 - Eric Olsen
Everyone has legitimate grievances - what counts most is how you deal with them.