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Putin Visits Former Theater Captives
November 6, 2002
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
MOSCOW (AP) - Meeting with survivors of last month's hostage crisis, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that his government had no doubts about the need to storm the Moscow theater but acknowledged the death toll was high.
At least 120 hostages died - 118 of them from the opiate-based gas Russia used to incapacitate the attackers, who had threatened to blow up the building if Russia did not end its war in Chechnya. The other two were shot by the gunmen.
``We had never faced a situation of such complexity before, yet no one had any doubt for even a second that the operation was necessary,'' Putin said during a meeting with cast members of the musical ``Nord-Ost,'' who were among some 800 people seized when a band of Chechen rebels interrupted the performance.
``We have come out of this situation at the price of a terrible tragedy, heavy, irreparable losses,'' Putin said in remarks broadcast on Russian television.
On Wednesday, 98 of the freed hostages were still in the hospital, six in critical condition, the Interfax news agency reported. Nine of the commandos who stormed the theater remained hospitalized as well, probably also as a result of the gas, the agency said.
``Our nation has lived through a terrible tragedy, a grave ordeal,'' Putin said. ``The consequences could have been much worse'' but for the hostages' ``courage, reserve and self-control,'' he said.
During a trip to southern Russia on Tuesday, Putin said the government had drawn lessons from the hostage crisis.
``It is necessary to work out fundamentally new approaches concerning the activity of not only the law enforcement agencies, but also the entire system of government institutions,'' Putin said, according to Interfax.
During a separate meeting with foreign ambassadors in the Kremlin on Wednesday, Putin said that the global community must take ``joint efforts to make sure that the masterminds and perpetrators of terrorist attacks don't find refuge in any country of the world.''
Officials have said all 41 attackers who were involved in the Oct. 23 raid - 22 men and 19 women- were killed during the storming three days later.
The government claims Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov planned the hostage-taking. It has pressed Denmark to extradite Maskhadov's envoy, Akhmed Zakayev, who was arrested in Copenhagen on Russia's request.
Russian forces withdrew from Chechnya in 1996 after separatist rebels fought them to a standstill in a 20-month war, but returned in 1999. Putin and other top officials had long contended that the war was winding down, in spite of daily small-scale clashes and occasional bigger rebel attacks.
On Sunday, Chechen rebels shot down a Russian military helicopter, killing nine people and showing Russia's continuing vulnerability to rebel attacks.
As Russian forces pressed ahead with a security crackdown in Chechnya on Wednesday, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov reiterated that a previously planned reduction in the number of troops deployed in Chechnya would not take place.
``In the situation that has shaped up today in the Chechen republic, I believe it premature to withdraw even those considered surplus troops until the extremists' leaders and their accomplices are either eliminated or brought to trial,'' Ivanov said during a tour of military facilities in Russia's Far East.
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