Moscow terror on centre stage

10.00pm

Tense negotiations to free 700 hostages captive in a Moscow theatre sputtered, stalled then began again tonight as Russian officials tried to avert a catastrophe.

Chechen rebels promised to release 75 foreign hostages, including children, but just as abruptly appeared to change their minds.

The rebels have vowed they are willing to die.

Negotiations with the Chechens, demanding an end to Russia's war in the separatist republic, were set back by a burst hot water pipe which flooded the first floor of the three-storey theatre, scaring the hostage-takers who said it was a ploy by intelligence agents.

US consul general James Warlick said talks had hit a snag.

"Negotiations broke down," he said.

The hostages include Americans, Britons, Dutch, Australians, Austrians and Germans.

The rebels have threatened to blow up the Moscow theatre they stormed on Wednesday night.

Today, they released the body of a young woman and fired a rocket at two others who scrambled to escape.

The actions of the Chechen rebels, who have so far released 39 captives, has thrown Russia into its biggest crisis in years and dealt a humiliating blow to President Vladimir Putin, whose meteoric rise to power was built largely on his decision to send Russian troops back into breakaway Chechnya.

It is also an embarrassment to Russia's once-feared intelligence agencies, which had no warning of an attack in the heart of Russian power.

Strapped with explosives the rebels - 25 men and 25 women, some widows of the Chechen war - stormed the theatre during the second act of a popular Russian musical.

They strapped two tonnes of explosives to load-bearing pillars and vowed to blow up the building if it was stormed by police.

Some audience members and many in the cast were able to flee in the early moments of the crisis.

Some off-stage actors barricaded themselves in an upstairs room then climbed down using costumes knotted together.

Negotiators including some of Russia's top politicians have tried to negotiate an end to the siege.

One, an MP who is also a singer beloved by Chechens, was promised that citizens of countries "not at war with Chechnya" would be released.

"I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living," an unidentified hostage-taker told satellite TV channel Al-Jazeera, which has carried messages from al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden during America's Afghanistan campaign.

"Each one of us is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of God and the independence of Chechnya."

In a second tape, five women wearing veils standing before a banner proclaiming in Arabic, "God is great", said: "It makes no difference for us where we will die. We have chosen to die here, in Moscow, and we will take the lives of hundreds of the infidels with us."

The hostages, still wearing their best clothes for a night out at the theatre, face a bleak third day of captivity.

They went to the theatre for the musical Nord-Ost (North-east), the heroic tale of an Arctic explorer, billed as a "captivating experience".

Instead, the orchestra pit is their toilet. Their food is water and chocolates, as well as a few Red Cross supplies allowed in today.

It is dank, musty but warm in the theatre, known by its Soviet-era name, the House of Culture for the State Ball Bearing Factory.

Images filmed by a television crew allowed briefly inside showed several women hostages, one playing nervously and obsessively with her fingers.

Dr Leonid Roshal, head of the Medical Centre for Catastrophes who was with the TV crew, said the hostages were trying to keep calm.

Two or three were hysterical. Others were reported to be close to nervous breakdown.

Some hostages have had explosives strapped to them.

Scared children were separated from their parents and shepherded to the theatre's balcony. To the hostage-takers they are not children but infidels. Their parents were herded like sheep to the stalls, and men separated from women. At a psychological counselling centre set up nearby in the grey, shabby neighbourhood, distraught relatives tried to contact family members inside the building on cellphones.

Inside, theatre-goers used their phones to tell the outside world of their plight in the hours after the attack, before the calls stopped abruptly.

Alina Vlasova, 24, said her sister Marina was so upset when she called from inside the theatre that she could barely speak.

"They are standing over us with automatic rifles and are getting angrier," Alina said her sister told her.

Another woman, Karina managed to contact her sister.

Gripped by fear and speaking softly to avoid attracting attention, Alona, 32, described how her son had tumbled from a balcony and was concussed as the Chechens stormed the building.

"She told me she had been separated from her children and he was trying to reach her by climbing down the theatre walls when he fell," Karina said. He was blinded and lost his sense of hearing.

Alona said the gunmen were furious and shouted at her to keep control over her children.

"It is very, very tense in here," Alona told her sister. Then the phone went dead.

Moscow paediatric heart specialist Maria Shkolnikova told a radio station from the theatre: "The Chechens are starting to get impatient with us. They say 'your Government is doing nothing to help you'."

Later, she was allowed out briefly to read a handwritten petition signed by the hostages addressed to the Russian President.

"We ask President Vladimir Putin to stop military actions in Chechnya," it read.

"These people are very serious, they are not going to joke and may launch terrorist acts all over Russia."

Russian TV stations have been covering the hostage drama around the clock.

But the phone calls from the hostages have added a chilling edge to the coverage.

"Please don't storm the theatre, they will kill us all," said another female hostagewho called a radio station after being allowed to go to the toilets.

Outside the building, columns of Russian Army and Interior Ministry troops filed past the front of the theatre, while armoured personnel carriers lurked on the streets and the FSB security service talked ominously of "storming" the theatre, a move that could result in a bloodbath.

Snipers perched on rooftops, and crowds of relatives huddled together or assailed officials asking for news.

"It's a nightmare," said Yekaterina Ostankhova, a woman in her 70s whose 19-year-old grandson, a theatre decorator, was inside.

"What's next? This is the capital, of all places. I've come here and I've heard nothing.



The incident, only 4.5km from the Kremlin, has spread fear throughout the city.

Security guards have stepped up protection at public gatherings and searched bags of passersby.

President Putin, looking grim-faced and drained, said on television that the rebel operation was planned "in one of the foreign terrorist centres" that "made a plan and found the perpetrators".