Word: russian
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...early hours of Saturday, gunshots from inside had forced into action the waiting Spetsnaz commando troops in the elite Alfa and Vympel antiterror units of the Federal Security Service. The Chechen hostage takers, it seemed, were about to fulfill their death vow. They had sworn that if Russian President Vladimir Putin had not declared an end to the war in Chechnya by Saturday at dawn, they would start killing hostages. If they were assaulted, they made clear they were ready to blow up explosives plastered around the auditorium and strapped to their bodies...
Forty minutes later, all 53 Chechen rebels were dead or captive. Anya and more than 750 other hostages had escaped alive, including some 30 children and 75 foreigners. But at least 90 Russian citizens died in the operation: killed in cross fire, perhaps, or suffocated by the mysterious gas, or even felled by heart attacks. Russian officials stressed that the deaths resulted from the siege's privations and stress. Nevertheless, Moscow hospitals appealed for blood, and eyewitnesses saw unconscious bodies carried from the theater. Many of the freed were delivered straight to toxicological wards to be treated for gas poisoning...
...Russian standards, the rescue operation was an unexpected success. Putin made the most of it, donning a white doctor's coat to visit freed hostages at a Moscow hospital. Yet for all the claims of victory Saturday, top Kremlin leaders must face up to the security failures that let the Chechen takeover happen in the first place. While it would be "untimely" to fire the country's security chiefs right now, a top Putin aide reportedly said, the President needs to take steps to ensure that such a terrifying event does not happen again in the middle of Moscow...
...Chechen Islamic Special Units, famously oversaw the capture and beheading of four telecommunications workers--three from Britain, one from New Zealand--in Chechnya in 1998. Movsar also had an aunt in the rebel business. Khava Barayeva is revered by Chechen guerrillas for her suicide car-bomb attack on a Russian base in the family's home village of Alkhan-Yurt. She was 19 when she blew up herself and two soldiers in June 2000. Arbi was killed last June in a six-day shootout with Russian forces, who displayed his body on a stretcher on television to convince skeptics...
...Russian authorities say the attack on the theater was meticulously planned and well-funded (costing some $60,000, Chechens familiar with guerrilla operations assert). It was sanctioned by top Chechen commanders, including the well-known Shamil Basayev, according to both Chechen and Russian sources. The same Chechen sources say the rebels' titular leader, Aslan Maskhadov, who distanced himself from the operation, was probably not consulted: most guerrillas feel he is irrelevant. Planning a raid like this takes six to eight weeks, a Chechen close to the guerrillas says. Another Chechen with experience in such operations thinks Movsar's people brought...