Leading Chechens Negotiate with Moscow Hostage Takers

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, October 24, 2002

Leading Chechens Negotiate with Moscow Hostage Takers

Two leading ethnic Chechen figures have entered a Moscow concert hall, seeking negotiations with a gang of armed Chechens, who have been holding an audience of hundreds hostage.

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Two leading ethnic Chechen figures have entered a Moscow concert hall, seeking negotiations with a gang of armed Chechens, who have been holding an audience of hundreds hostage.

Aslanbek Aslakhanov, a Duma member representing Chechnya, and Ruslan Khasbulatov, a former speaker of parliament, were inside the hall in southeastern Moscow, trying to set up a negotiation process, the Interfax news agency quoted Kremlin aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky as saying.

The latest Interfax report quoted Aslakhanov as saying that he held telephone talks with Chechen field commander Movsar Barayev, who controlled the hostage-taking gang, but failed to work out any agreement. Barayev is the nephew of warlord Arbi Barayev, who was reportedly killed last year.

Sources in Moscow's police headquarters told Interfax that attempts to make further contacts might be made again.

Yastrzhembsky said both Aslakhanov and Khasbulatov had rich experience of negotiating in hostage dramas.

A Russian official said the gang had released about 170 people, mainly children, foreigners and Georgians, but was still holding most of the hostages.

They also threatened that they had mined part of the five-store theater and would blow up the whole building if police launched an assault against them.

A female journalist of the Ekho Moskvy radio reported from inside the hall that the terrorists were prepared to release 50 hostages in exchange for Chechnya's administration head, Akhmad Kadyrov.

The Chechen rebel website, Kavkaz.org, said the attackers were under the control of the Chechen field commander Movsar Barayev.

Moscow police have tightened security around the city's major installations, especially government buildings, power stations and oil refineries.

A female Interfax reporter, who was inside the concert hall at the time of the raid, said by telephone that the gunmen were preventing the audience from leaving the theater, but allowing them to make telephone calls.

The concert hall was staging a performance of the musical, Nord-Ost, one of the Russian capital's most popular productions, when the armed attackers broke in at about 9 p.m. (1800 GMT) and fired intensively into the air.

President Vladimir Putin called for a crisis meeting in the Kremlin with senior security chiefs and his Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov as hundreds of heavily-armed special forces and police braced themselves around the theater,

The Moscow theater attack would be the most audacious by Chechens since the first Chechen war, of 1994 to 1996.

In 1995, about 120 people were killed after rebels seized a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budennovsk. In 1996, a Chechen group took more than 2,000 people hostage in a raid on the Dagestani town of Kizlyar.

The concert hall attack is embarrassing for Putin, who has been trying to stabilize the security situation in Chechnya.

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