7:18AM. The official representative of the operational headquarters, general Vasiliev, said that the FSB special tactics unit seized the Theater Center. (Me too, they seized me in Altay; they were 70 people capturing an unarmed man.)
9:23AM. All Moscow’s free ambulances are ordered to gather on Dubrovka.
9:50AM. All the hostages are taken out of the building.
10:35AM. The FSB director Nikolay Patrushev and the Interior Minister Boris Grizlov informed Putin about the successful completion of the operation to release the hostages.
At 9:00AM Russia’s president Vladimir Putin addressed the nation: “Dear compatriots! During these days we have gone through a terrible ordeal. All our thoughts were with the people who fell in the hands of the armed bastards. We hoped that these people will be freed but every one of us realized that we have to be ready for the worse. Today, early in the morning an operation to release the hostages was carried out. We achieved the near impossible, saving hundreds, hundreds of people. We proved that they can’t put Russia on its knees. But now I foremost want to adress the relatives and the loved-ones of the people who died. Forgive us. The memory of the dead must unite us. We were not able to save them all. I thank all Russia’s citizens for their self-control and unity. My special thanks go to those who took part in releasing the people. Foremost, the commandos of the special units who did not hesitate to risk their lives and fought for saving the people. We are also grateful to our friends in the whole world for their moral and practical support in our fight with our common ennemy. This ennemy is strong and dangerous, unhuman and cruel. It is international terrorism. Until it is overcome people in the whole world will not feel safe. But it must be overcome. And will be overcome. Today in the hospital I spoke with one of the victims. He said: ‘I was not afraid – I was certain that the terrorists don’t have a future.’ And this is true. They don’t have a future. But we do.”
Thinking over the president’s speech I come to the conclusion that it is all lies. Movsar Basayev and his group of 50 militants: 18 women and 33 men were all Chechens and not international terrorists. And they demanded to stop the war in Chechnya and did not ask anything else. The terrorists did have a future at the moment when the president gave his speech and this was proved by the subsequent terrorist acts in Chechnya, such as the murder of Akhmad Kadirov and the terrorist acts on Russia’s territory, including Moscow. And the terrorists will have a future until Chechnya’s fate is resolved politically.
What concerns the gratefulness to the commandos of the special units, I am sure that it stuck in their craws. The FSB special forces’ commandos were used to kill the hostages. I have no doubt that many of those who took part in this killing make nightmares and will make them until the end of their days. “Who did not hesitate to risk their lives and fought for saving the people”, said the presidnet. In reality there was ridiculosuly little risk. And the main proof of that is the fact that nobody from the commandos died, while 174 histages did, this is the number, on which insists today the Nord-Ost Victims Committee. As for other proofs, well, here they are. Let us return to the testimonies of the witnesses. October 23rd 2003, Kommersant, the title is “Overdose”. The subtitle: “The FSB carried out an experiment on the hostages”. “ Practicly all of the hostages were killed by the gas used by the speical forces, as Moscow’s health Committee aknowledged yesterday. This gas was not normally used as a weapon by the Alpha unit. It can’t be excluded that the dead hostages were the victims of an experiment carried out in the frames of the worldwide fight with terrorism.”
The following picture appears from reading the entire text of the “Overdose” article. Two hours before the raid Movsar Barayev was called on his cellphone by politicians, generals and even the criminal authority Lechi Islamov (The Beard) from Krasnopresen Prison. (You recall that at 5:40 the operational headquarters affirmed that they resumed the talks “in the form of telephone contacts”.) This was made in order to distract Barayev and relax the vigilance of the terrorists. While Movsar Barayev was talking, commandos of the Alpha special unit were already at work in the Theater Center on Dubrovka. Before this they were already consulting the Center’s technical employees for two days. “The agents brought out a plan of the building, one of the technicians told Kommersant, and asked me where are located the ventilation boxes and shafts: on the night before the raid one of the special units got to the first floor of the building where the technical rooms were. They have large windows, the size of a person. And the terrorists, fearing snipers, did not go down there. The commandos made small openings in the walls and the partitions. With their help they managed to get access to the ventilation and also to fix the video system that allowed controlling all the events happening in the hall. Thus the commandos found out that the male terrorists armed with automatic guns are located on the stage and on the second floor of the captured building. The hall is mainly controlled by the female suicide bombers. When gunfire was heard in the hall, continues the technical employee of the Center on Dubrovka, we were in a storeroom on the first floor with the commandos. They immediately started to contact someone on their walki-talkies and judging by their conversation got the ‘ok’ for the raid. Actually the group that was with us did not fight. The commandos went near the openings in the walls leading to the ventilation. Some of them took their backpacks and got out cylinders that reminded those of the scuba divers, only smaller and made of plastic and not of metal. I don’t know what happened next. Before releasing the gas they led the civilians out of the building and the cordon.”
I am sure that the people working in Alpha are courageous. However it is disgusting to imagine special forces officers with cylinders, in masks, ready to kill 174 peacful viewers together with the militants. They look like Drs Mengele and not special forces’ officers. Kommersant cites the remarks of the hostages’ relatives present in the yard of the 13th Hospital on October 23rd 2003, looking for their loved corpses: “They killed the people, they killed their own people”, “we were exterminated like cockroaches”. In fact, like cockroaches because only two hostages died from bullets, nobody died from the non-existing explosions, but all because of the gas. This deserved the special gratefulness of the president to the commandos, sent to this terrible, inhuman task under the protection of gas masks and a layer of lies. The claim that the raid was a consequence of the hostages’ executions that began in the hall is a total lie, a plain lie, a 360є lie. We remember that the militants were waiting for someone from the government at 11 o’clock. The same Kommersant cites “a boy named Yegor who left the 13th Hospital”. On the journalist’s question: “Were you shot at?” Yegor answers: “No, nobody was shot at.” “So there were no executions before the raid?” “There weren’t.” “Then why did they say that the terrorists started to execute the hostages?” a naпve German journalist asks Yegor. “I haven’t slept that day,” answers Yegor. “The terrorists were calm and when the gas was released they did not understand at first. I saw how they were running, scared. And then they started to fall and to fall asleep. I lost consciousness too.”