Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis - Demands

Demands

The gunmen were led by Movsar Barayev, nephew of slain Chechen rebel militia commander Arbi Barayev, and threatened to kill the hostages unless Russian forces were immediately and unconditionally withdrawn from Chechnya. They said the deadline was one week, after which they would start killing the hostages.

A videotaped statement was acquired by the media in which the gunmen declared their willingness to die for their cause. The statement contained the following text:

According to the Kremlin's aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky, "when they were told that the withdrawal of troops was unrealistic within the short period, that it was a very long process, the terrorists put forward the demand to withdraw Russian troops from anywhere in the Republic of Chechnya without specifying which area it was". The hostage-takers demanded termination of the use of artillery and air forces in Chechnya starting the next day (Russian forces ceased using heavy weapons until September 28), a halt to the notorious zachistka ("mopping-up") operations, and that President of Russia Vladimir Putin should publicly declare that he was striving to stop the war in Chechnya. By the time of the hostage-taking, the conflict in the embattled republic was killing an average of three federal troops daily.

Cell phone conversations between the hostages trapped in the building and their family members revealed that the hostage-takers had grenades, mines and improvised explosive devices strapped to their bodies, and had deployed more explosives throughout the theater. A majority of these explosives (including all those worn by the female fighters) were later found to be military dummies. The remaining ones had no detonators or the batteries were taken out. Russian negotiators and special forces were unable to be certain at the time, but prior to the siege while the explosives were being prepared, an FSB agent who had infiltrated the Chechen Jihadist shipping network had sabotaged many of the devices with drained batteries and insufficient accelerator or booster charges for the main charges to detonate. The militants used Arabic names among themselves, and the female terrorists wore Arab-style burqa clothes which are highly unusual in the North Caucasus region.

A spokesman for the Chechen separatist leadership said he had no information about who the attackers were and condemned attacks on civilians. The pro-Moscow Islamic leader of Chechnya also condemned the attack.

All hostages were kept in the auditorium and the orchestra pit was used as a lavatory. The situation in the hall was nervous and it frequently changed depending on the mood of the hostage-takers, who were following reports in the mass media. Any kind of misinformation caused hopelessness among the hostages and new aggression among their captors, who would threaten to shoot hostages and blow up the building; however, no major disasters took place during the siege. The gunmen had let members of the audience make phone calls. One hostage used her mobile phone to plead with authorities not to storm the auditorium, as truckloads of police and soldiers accompanied by armored vehicles surrounded the building.