BLOODY DRAMA

摘要

They are gassign us! We really beg not to be gassed. We hope it will not be like the Kursk!" As a thick, visible mist enveloped hostages and their takers in Moscow's House of Culture theater, Anya cried for help through her cell phone. The hostage thought she was about to suffocate slowly just like the sailors trapped aboard the crippled Russian submarine Kursk in 2000. "We see it, we feel it, we are breathing through our clothes. We are all going to be blown up!" But the fast-acting sleeping agent being pumped into the theater was the key ingredient in a daring rescue raid. As early as Day One of the hostage standoff, diggers had been tunneling underneath the theater in preparation for an assault. Now in the 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.