Hostage Crisis: Moscow Under Siege

Hostage Crisis: Moscow Under Siege

– 40 heavily armed Islamist terrorists seize a theater and over 800 innocent civilians.

Demands are made.

Hostages are lined up for execution.

The clock starts ticking.

– It was an absolute nightmare situation from the point of view of the security forces.

– Only the elite special ops force, Spetsnaz Group Alfa has a chance to defeat them.

It’s a race against time as deadlines approach.

– You got to have people willing to go there.

And that’s the difference between a soldier and a specialist.

– there’s no obvious way of preventing the murder of hundreds.

Only one very long shot a secret Russian technology that’s never been tried before stands a chance of saving them.

Now on “Black Ops” we go behind the scenes on one of the most unbelievably risky hostage rescues in modern times.

– It’s not a movie, it’s not a reality show.

It’s reality.

And reality’s very unpredictable.

–   The crisis starts on an ordinary evening in an ordinary suburb of Russia’s capital city, Moscow.

It’s a wet autumn night, and for 800 Russians, a time with friends and family at a popular musical is a welcome prospect to cheer up a dreary weekday evening.

– Almost by accident we got to see the musical, we didn’t plan to.

The weather on this day was terrible.

It was a very gray day.

My granddaughter was very young at the time.

She felt really nervous, as if something bad was going to happen.

She was really crying, and she wouldn’t let us go.

– Tickets are sold out at the popular venue, a huge Soviet-era building that had been converted into an arts center, a place of peaceful, civilized recreation.

– In some ways, what was particularly striking about it was that it was not striking.

It was not a particular high-prestige target.

– This is the theater’s actual recording of that fateful night’s performance of a romantic comedy set in the 1950s, with the plot featuring cheerful Russian soldiers.

Just a block away, four vans with a force of 40 heavily armed Chechen terrorists are closing in on the theater fast.

– We were enjoying it.

After the interval, we went back to the second half, and there was dancing, and that’s when the siege started.

– Now the extremists burst into the theater, rake the foyer with gunfire, and spread through the building fast.

They’re suicide bombers who, for years, have been at war with Russia.

Islamist Jihadis from a breakaway republic who will stop at nothing to get their way.

Now they’ve brought their campaign of terror into the midst of Russia’s civilians.

The theater’s recording reveals the moments the terrorists take over the building as they seal it off from the outside world.

– People in military uniform walked around the auditorium and down the aisles, and at first I thought it was part of the play.

– One of the actors was made to sit next to me after the Chechens had stormed the stage, and I whispered, “That’s an amazing piece of theater.

” – Slowly, the audience realizes that the game has changed, the terror has started, and they’re now hostages.

– Then I saw some of the soldiers hit people with rifle butts, and I realized that it was serious.

– And he replied, “That’s not part of the play.

“This is for real.

” It was then that I realized what danger we were in.

– Now the terrorists are in control, and the siege has begun.

The theater couldn’t be better designed as a place to hold hostages.

The auditorium is a perfect prison with few exits that are easy to guard.

Every one of the terrorists are radical extremists committed to die for their cause, pitiless and determined.

– The unique feature of a terrorist threat is that you can never predict how serious their plans are, if they’re just bluffing or if they are really ready to sacrifice themselves.

We were inclined to think that they were not joking.

– With alarm bells ringing in every security department in Moscow, the worst possible scenario is now a reality.

– It was an absolute nightmare situation from the point of view of the security forces.

It really is, it’s the last thing they wanted.

They knew from past experience that the Chechen terrorists would be, if necessary, willing to blow themselves up.

Amongst the terrorists, there would be people who had, had experience fighting during the Guerilla War, and therefore they knew how to use their weapons.

They were unlikely to listen to humanitarian appeals.

– It looks like a no-win situation for Russia’s authorities.

Their only hope, Spetsnaz Group Alfa, an anti-terror unit the envy of the world, soldiers built to take on terrorists, hardened by years of confronting Chechen attackers.

But even for them, a mass suicide-bomb attack and 850 hostages is an almost impossible challenge.

Within minutes, the elite of Russia’s anti-terror strategists are scrambled.

It’s clear that conventional tactics won’t work.

Their solution, a secret gas technology unknown outside Russia.

But there’s a problem.

It’s completely untried.

If it succeeds, it’ll beat the terrorists.

If it fails, the consequences are unthinkable.

Orders from the Kremlin summon every fighting man in the city, and Moscow’s barracks are emptied as hundreds descend on the theater.

The Chechen terrorists have some new techniques of their own to add to their advantage.

Never seen before, female suicide bombers the so-called black widows women who’ve lost their loved ones and are willing to die for their cause.

At a single command, they’ll detonate their bomb belts and trigger a series of massive explosions that will demolish the theater, killing everyone.

This is payback for years of suffering in a conflict with Russia that seems impossible to resolve peacefully.

– A lot of people passionately hate the Russian government and project their hate on all Russians.

When your family’s been destroyed, you’d never go for peace talks, at least until you get some revenge.

The government spawned a huge number of sworn enemies, and the black widows who appeared on the TV for the first time were a variation of such sworn enemies.

– The Chechens make sure the black widows are constantly on display.

– They appeared in absolutely all footage, in journalistic as well as that made by terrorists themselves.

All of them were dressed in black and were wearing suicide bomber’s belts.

Their main task was to show that they were ready for everything.

– The black widows are not just a propaganda tool.

They’re also deadly serious.

They’ve come to Moscow for one purpose only.

– Everyone understood that this was not an act, everyone knew that these women, if they called themselves black widows, were ready to blow themselves up.

– Finally, there are two massive bombs each too heavy for a single person to lift placed among the hostages at the center of the auditorium, their hair-trigger detonator at the fingertip of a black widow.

The Chechen’s terror tactics are well known to Russia’s authorities.

They’re experts at capturing big public buildings and holding large groups hostage.

Hospitals and schools have been targets in the past.

Now a theater gives them the perfect platform to get the world’s attention.

– The main danger was obvious, a very powerful bomb in the auditorium with suicide bombers.

I knew Alfa had very little time for an assault, and only a very slim chance to destroy the terrorists before they detonated their infernal machine.

I’d never known a situation where people were grouped around a giant bomb that could be detonated in one second.

– Group Alfa have to weigh up the risks very carefully.

Their expertise is all about speed in an assault situation.

For years their adversaries, the Chechens have had to devise a solution to the Spetsnaz incredible discipline and aggression.

Now they think they’ve cracked it and have Alfa in the ultimate stranglehold.

– It’s not as easy as kicking in the door and shooting someone between the eyes.

Not when you have 40 people willing and able to shoot back.

And some of them willing and able to blow themselves up along with thousand hostages.

So the equation is very different from a video game or TV show or a movie.

The cost is very different, the consequences, the possibilities are very different.

– And any hope of a peaceful resolution is very small.

The Chechens can only be pacified by the impossible, the withdrawal of Russian troops from their homeland.

– The terrorist’s agenda was straightforward if ridiculously unrealistic.

They wanted, basically, the Russians to pull out of Chechnya.

They wanted an end to the war, and they wanted victory.

They were not necessarily stupid.

They had, I think, no real expectation that this was going to happen.

This was, frankly, a terror raid rather than a carefully planned political act.

– Only one group has a chance if taking them out without setting off the bombs, the elite Spetsnaz Group Alfa, among the most experienced and successful anti-terrorist special forces in the world, Group Alfa are Russia’s Navy Seals.

Their headquarters Moscow.

The Chechens have brought their war to the home city of Russia’s hardest men.

– A massive group of people take over in the heart of Moscow, in the heart of Russia, I couldn’t believe it how 30 people got in and managed to take so many people hostage.

When I got the call, it was very brief “It’s an emergency.

” – Alfa was formed in the 1970s and has evolved constantly since.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union needed ruthless killers more than battlefield heroes, people who could start revolutions and kill heads of state without anyone knowing who was behind it.

That meant lightning speed, total stealth, and clinical precision.

– These are not negotiators.

These are not people who are there to rescue hostages first and foremost.

These are people who go in because they have people to kill.

– Wah.

– Alfa training is the toughest in the world with levels of brutality and extreme personal endurance that in many armed forces would be illegal.

– They go through a phenomenally brutal training regime which culminates in sort of a 12-minute period where they have to take on 12 experienced special forces in hand-to-hand combat, and all they have to do is basically stay standing at the end of that 12 minutes.

Even so, a lot of them never get through that.

– Wah.

– You cannot just wish for it.

You have to learn it, you have to ingrain it in people, and there is a method to that madness.

– but Alfa operatives are trained not to just be physically tough, but to be extremely mentally capable as well.

– Training is the most important part, not the hardware, the toys, the technical implements.

You become a thinking fighter, thinking operator versus someone who follows the script.

– Aah.

– The glory days of Russia’s special forces were Afghanistan in the 1970s and ’80s.

They were sent to Kabul to kill the Afghan president, and in the raid lost only two men.

But after the Cold War, Russia’s biggest problem was terrorism, and it was Alfa that answered the call.

They are among the world’s great experts in dealing with hostage taking, and specialize in extracting people from a massive range of different environments.

– If you are an Alfa officer specializing in storming airplanes, you will train all day long to storm the plane blindfolded.

You know where every rivet is.

You know how to open the aisle cover, how to penetrate the plane through the service doors, and so on.

– But there’s another reason why the Moscow theater siege mission is special.

Alfa’s reputation has been tarnished after being drawn into Russia’s unstable internal politics.

The unit’s reputation reached the ultimate low in 1991, when it was ordered to crush popular support for the government and back a coup by hard-line communists.

– There have always been hard times, especially in those moments when we realized that our division was being misused.

Our primary objective is fighting terrorists, the homeland enemies, and we have always perceived and still perceive internal conflicts with suspicion.

– The attempted coup turned Alfa from the heroes of Afghanistan into the attack dogs of Russia’s secret police.

– It all came as a real shock.

All the officers had a very hard time.

We were not prepared to fight our own people.

We all saw ourselves as an elite unit whose mission was to save people, and we were seeing through our helmet visor people just like our mothers, sisters and brothers.

We had no desire to use special techniques on our own people.

Naturally, this affected the combat ability.

It is one thing to fight your enemy, and another thing your own people.

– Now, 11 years later, Spetsnaz Group Alfa have a chance to assert their integrity as defenders of their nation by taking on its most deadly enemy in the heart of the country.

But it’s a chance that comes at a price.

It will be the toughest test ever of their formidable skills.

Alfa’s elite planners know they have a challenge from the Chechen terrorists that is uniquely tailored to stop even the fastest assault.

The weapons that usually guarantee success, speed and aggression can’t work in this situation.

So careful planning, calculation and timing are crucial to give Alfa every chance of success.

– They had to work fast but on the other hand they had to prepare as much as possible.

They had to try and scope out the area, they had everything from listening devices to using fiberoptic vision devices to try and see what was going on.

They had to run a few mock-up operations just so their special forces had a sense of where they were going and where the targets were.

So it’s this balance.

On the one hand, you don’t wanna leave it too long, so that something bad happens.

On the other hand, you don’t want to rush it.

– But even with the best planning and timing Alfa is outmaneuvered by the simple fact that suicide bombers only need to press a trigger to inflict mass casualties.

Stopping that is beyond conventional tactics.

Moscow has been on high alert for a major terrorist incident for over a year, since 9/11.

Already this year, there have been attacks on subways and residential properties.

Now the city is facing a crisis on an unprecedented scale.

– This wasn’t a standard situation.

In the history of the special forces, this was a first in Moscow.

– Alfa are specialist siege commandos.

This is what they train for night and day.

The challenge of the suicide bombers belts is big enough.

Each might kill 30 or 40 people.

But the giant bombs are powerful enough to kill everyone in the auditorium, all 850.

It’s clear that Alfa’s planners had to come up with a radically new solution that will give their men the edge.

For the hostages surrounded by suicide bombers vowing to die, an assault by special forces is a terrifying thought.

Calling their families and the media, they do everything they can to stop Alfa from attacking.

– They were making phone calls saying, “Please don’t let them storm the theater.

“Please negotiate peacefully and carefully, “and maybe you’ll be able to find a peaceful solution.

” – To increase the pressure on Russia’s authorities, the terrorists have been releasing footage of the hostages.

And they’re careful to avoid revealing anything that might be useful to attackers.

Then, they make their first mistake.

As an act of mercy, they release some vulnerable hostages, children and sick people.

With careful questioning, Alfa’s intelligence officers are able to get the first bits of information about the situation inside the theater, that the Chechens don’t want known.

The total number of terrorists, the positions of snipers, and ammunition stores.

Then, six hours into the siege, a completely unpredictable element enters the equation.

a truly bizarre event takes place.

As unseen by the security guards around the theater, a young woman walks right off the street and into the theater.

No one knows who she is or why she’s there.

She goes into the auditorium and shouts at the audience, telling them to rise up against the Chechens.

And then she starts at the gunman.

– She bust through the aisle screaming, “What have you done? “You should release all the people” she was saying, “I’m going to call the police.

” Maybe she was drunk.

The Chechens said she was a KGB agent pretending to be a drunk woman.

– The Chechens show just what they do with anyone who won’t take them seriously.

– The woman was a 26-year-old local shop assistant, Olga Romanova, with no connection to the hostages or the theater.

– After that incident with Olga, just after it happened, the whole mood among the audience and terrorists changed.

From then on, there was a different atmosphere.

Everyone understood that this was something that might happen again.

It was much more serious.

– All the time, as the world looks on in horror, Alfa intelligence is building up a detailed picture of the situation inside the theater and the weaknesses of the terrorists.

Mobile phone conversations between the hostages and their families now reveal a much more serious situation.

The terrorists have not only wired the auditorium to kill all the hostages, but wired the whole building and packed it with bombs.

– The security people were 100% convinced the bombs were real and would be detonated.

This put the special forces in a position where they knew they would almost certainly be killed along with 90% of the hostages.

So, they were looking for whatever advantage they could get.

That meant they were ruling out nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing.

– 48 hours into the siege, and the terrorists decide to turn up the heat.

The Chechen commander, Movsar Barayev, announces he’s going to start executions at midnight, one killing every hour until his demands are met.

The victims are selected by Barayev himself.

–   There was a decision to shoot 10 people on either the fourth or fifth row.

And just after this information started to spread around the hostages, one of the Chechens came and sat down at the end of the fifth row wearing a mask, and everyone now expected that at any minute, something would happen to the people in the fifth row.

– Now the Russian authorities face a dilemma.

Either Alfa goes in and triggers an explosion with mass casualties, or the world watches helpless as the Chechens start killing innocent men, women and children, one by one, hour by hour.

Alfa strategists now have to go for their most radical solution a long shot, so risky it would normally be dismissed as impossible.

but this is an impossible situation.

For years, Russian military scientists have been working on a secret formula for a knockout gas that will stop any aggressor in his tracks.

Even today, its exact composition is a state secret, and scientists outside Russia can only guess what it really was.

– As far as we can ascertain, the agent that was used in the theater siege was a derivative of an opiate called fentanyl.

Opiates are very potent, and they depress your breathing.

They’re normally used in operating theaters.

But what they wanted was something that would act very quickly, knock people out, that could be delivered in the air.

So this is why they probably chose fentanyl.

– In complete secrecy, Russia’s military scientists have figured a way to multiply the strength of a powerful medical anesthetic by a factor of several thousand.

If this top-secret, untried chemical can somehow be piped into the theater without anyone noticing, it might just sedate the terrorists enough to stop them from detonating their bombs and give Alfa a chance of taking them out in an assault.

It sounds like something out of science fiction, but it’s about to get the green light from President Putin himself.

– This is absolutely a one-off.

Sometimes gasses from knockout to tear gas have been used, but never has it been used on this scale in these kind of concentrations to flood an entire area with knockout gas.

– Their logic was that if 90% of the hostages would die anyway, and if this gas could help save at least a few, then it should be applied.

– But even if they use the gas, there’s a problem.

The Chechen leader, Movsar Barayev, is going to start executions at midnight.

That’s just two hours away.

To get the gas equipment inside the building and then fill it up so it knocks people out is going to take far longer.

Even with the secret weapon, it looks like there’s no way of stopping the executions of innocent civilians.

Outside the theater special forces units from all over Moscow gather, knowing they face a formidable enemy who make up in determination what the lack in skill.

– The Chechens were an interesting mix.

They ranged a whole gamut from people who are really experienced fighters, who had done the national service in Soviet times, then they had actually gone on to become anti-Soviet rebels and had fought through the last decade or so of civil war and insurgency within Russia.

They therefore knew the trade craft of how to fight and they also had a degree of discipline in esprit de corps.

– And the terrible destruction brought by war in their homeland means that they will stop at nothing to get even with the Russian authorities.

– They were, on the whole, motivated by loss, by anger.

There were a certain number who were, of example, members of their own family had been killed.

In some cases they had been arrested by the authorities and then were never seen again or turned up in some ditch.

So they didn’t necessarily have the same skill but by God they certainly commitment and determination to eventually pay the Russians back for what had happened.

– It isn’t long before the gunmen get a chance to demonstrate once again how ready they are to kill innocent civilians, as a anxious relative decides to take matters into his own hands.

A middle aged man, Gennady Vlakh, strides into the theater and demands that the Chechens release his son.

And the Chechens waste no time in deciding how to respond.

Any doubts that the terrorists mean business and have no difficulties killing Russians whenever it suits them have now been completely discarded.

Alfa’s strategists have hours to get the gas working, if they’re to prevent the start of executions.

The trouble is, that simply isn’t possible.

And there’s another factor ramping up the time pressure, days without sleep and massive stress means both hostages and captors are getting jumpy.

– The sense is that just one individual can do something silly, or else, just bad luck.

You know, for example, let’s say some of the hostages try to take matters into their own hands and it could lead to a massive explosion.

– The most important thing they’re all afraid of was the psychological fatigue of the terrorists, so everyone was aware that there was a time limit.

– Alfa badly need two things, more time and anything that will calm the situation down.

And an hour before the deadline, the unexpected once again changes the game.

Movsar Barayev, the Chechen leader, gets a phone call from Moscow’s special envoy to Chechnya, General Viktor Kazantsev.

He offers to fly to Moscow and negotiate face-to-face with the terrorists with the full authority of the president, Vladimir Putin, behind him.

There’s one condition, no executions.

The Chechens buy it.

– Barayev came in looking happy, saying “Tomorrow, Kazantsev is flying back to Moscow.

” And at that point, the mood lifted.

The black widows came across as much more upbeat and started telling us, “You see, “our Barayev gets things done better than your Putin.

” – For the Chechens, this seems a major strategic breakthrough, and they’re overjoyed.

This is the actual wire-tapped conversation between Kazantsev and Barayev cutting a deal to delay the executions.

The terrorists’ plan seems to be working.

Until now, they’ve been ignored, outlaws from a forgotten conflict.

Now the president’s man is coming to plead with them in the heart of the Russian capitol.

– It was undoubtedly a delay tactic.

One thing that the authorities knew is they need time.

They needed time to dig out the blueprints of the theater and train their operations forces to make an assault.

They needed time to decide what they were gonna do.

– Meanwhile, Alfa uses the precious time bought by the negotiators to maximum effect.

Through the night, deep beneath the theater, working in total silence and with utmost care, engineers secure canisters of the knockout gas in strategic parts of the theater’s air-conditioning.

The time for it to be released has arrived.

Gradually, it starts to filter into the auditorium to do its work.

Aware that something is happening, the Chechen gunmen run from the auditorium and leave the black widows at their posts.

But rather than set off the bombs, the gunmen seem to want to prolong the siege and run to the defense of the building, determined to take on their old adversaries, the Spetsnaz, in combat.

But there isn’t anyone to fight.

Alfa group still has to hold back.

If just one black widow is conscious, the whole theater could still blow.

And every minute that the auditorium fills with the powerful agent, the danger to the hostages increases.

– One of the problems is where you release the agent.

So you have to use air vents.

And you’ve got to ensure that the agent you release will knock everybody out quickly, so this means that you have to pump in huge quantities to reach the people at the far end of the theater.

And, in pumping in large amounts, what you’re going to end up doing is giving some people at the far end of the theater enough to knock them out, but the people close to the vent are going to get many times the lethal dose of an agent.

– Soon after the release of the gas, the first signs of its effects emerge.

Semi-drugged hostages manage to escape the auditorium.

It’s clear the terrorists are no longer in control.

Now is the time to strike.

The waiting’s over.

The word comes from strategic command to go.

– When the officers received the order to enter the building and destroy the terrorists, all of them were 100% certain that in the event of an explosion, no one would come back alive.

– It’s our job.

If you’re going to think about the mission too much and what could go wrong, it’s not going to help.

You go into zombie mode, autopilot, to fulfill the mission.

It may seem cold, but it is necessary.

– Taking out as many Chechens as possible before the order to detonate is now the top priority.

Alfa’s legendary speed cuts down the gunmen in seconds.

– It would have been good to take some terrorists alive to question them, but when you’re there in that situation, you have weapons, they have weapons, and you need to fire before they do.

It’s a quick decision.

– And in the auditorium, Alfa killed every black widow without a second’s pause.

Some die before they can detonate their bomb belts.

Others press the triggers only for the belts to fail.

But the theater could still blow at any moment because there’s still one person who can inflict mass casualties.

Now, seconds count in the hunt to stop the Chechen leader, Movsar Barayev.

– We were expecting Barayev to be in the auditorium with the bombs, and he wasn’t.

– Movsar Barayev is loose in the building.

Now Spetsnaz have to find him and stop him before he puts into action the terrorists’ ultimate sanction, detonation of the bombs.

Eventually, he’s traced to a storeroom behind the theater’s cafeteria.

–   Once the officers of Alfa came in, after just a minute and a half, all the terrorists were shot down, and none of them managed to trigger a single bomb.

– The whole operation was not more than ten minutes in duration.

the shooting itself can be counted in just a few minutes.

– Alfa’s lightning speed prevents the explosions and stops the crisis in its tracks.

It is, without doubt, one of the most successful Alfa operations ever undertaken.

Not a single operative or hostage is harmed, and all the enemy are taken out.

– I remember that I thought, thank god the bombs did not go off.

I can imagine if the bombs had exploded, no one would have survived.

– The first hostages are pulled to safety as the whole world watches the extraordinary success of the elite force after three days of agony.

It looks like Alfa’s reputation has risen from the ashes.

But any hope that the mission’s over is quickly dashed.

For even from beyond the grave, the Chechens have another surprise for the Russians they hate so much.

Intelligence reports suggest there are hidden bombs around the theater on timers that are impossible to find and defuse in time.

If this intelligence is true, the theater could still blow at any moment.

They have to get the hostages out fast.

With extraordinary haste verging on panic, rescue teams sweep into the building.

Their task to haul out the unconscious hostages in a race against time with an unknown number of ticking time bombs beneath them.

But in a siege beset by surprises and unexpected twists, the greatest of all is about to unfold in front of the world’s TV cameras.

– The Dubrovka operation should be divided into two major phases.

One which involved Alfa units who did their job, and another one that happened afterwards.

– As phase one of the military operation is completed, the job is now to get the hostages out of the theater.

– Alfa were not essentially tasked with getting the hostages out.

There were too few of them, and that’s not really what they’re about.

That would have been the role of other elements within the fire service, within the ambulance corps or whatever.

And this is really where the operation fell apart.

– Alfa’s done a brilliant job a textbook operation that couldn’t have been bettered by any special forces team anywhere.

But the hostages aren’t out of danger, and the mission is about to enter its darkest phase yet.

– When the first media reports about the completion of the operation and the freeing of the hostages started coming in, of course we were all euphoric, including myself.

We saw dead black widows, and there was no information on their losses.

– And then the stark reality starts to emerge.

– And then after we saw and got the reports that the operation went well.

There was no explosion, people were reported alive.

And then the tragedy came.

Every hour updates began to come of 10, 20, 30, 40 people dead.

Everyone was stunned.

– Hostages that look as if they’re unconscious from the gas are in fact dying, and it’s due to the same technology used to rescue them.

– Some of the police officers that carried the people out, they had no idea about the recovery position for people that have a severe respiratory depression, so they just laid them on their backs, and people suffocated.

Instead of putting them in their recovery positions on the side, where the tongue would relax and they would be able to breathe until the antidote was administered.

– The brilliance of Alfa’s military operation is now being catastrophically let down by civilian evacuation, wreaking more havoc in minutes than the Chechens have done in the previous three days.

– If you were going to do something like this thoroughly, you would want everybody primed, and for some reason, that didn’t happen.

The people who needed to help with the cleanup and the protection of individuals who were affected just didn’t know what to do.

– without realizing the terrible damage they’re doing, paramedics and police are carrying out drugged hostages with their heads at dangerous angles, lying unconscious faces exposed upwards to the elements.

Completely helpless, hostages are suffocating, choking on their own vomit or gagging to death on their tongues.

– It was quite clear that the way people were brought out and just dumped when they came out of the theater, that no thought had been given to the fact that people’s breathing might have been compromised.

So, there was very little coordination.

– A lot of people who were involved, from the medical perspective, hadn’t been told it was fentanyl that was used, they didn’t even know how to treat the individuals concerned.

And therefore there was this awful vacuum.

And that’s frankly where so many of the hostages died, or why so many of the hostages died, is because at that moment, where you needed to have a seamless handover from, as it where, the killers to the savers.

There was in fact a moment of uncertainty, a moment of insecurity.

And also again a very classic moment of, well in Russian terms, security took precedence that until people were absolutely certain that there, for example, no terrorists amongst the hostages, none of the hostages could be removed.

Because you had to make sure you got all the terrorists.

– And it’s not only that the evacuation teams aren’t organized to deal with drugged hostages.

They haven’t even prepared enough supplies for the hundreds who need treatment.

An antidote to the gas exists, but it’s only available in tiny quantities with a handful of people qualified to administer it.

In the hours and days that follow the siege, the city’s hospitals struggle to cope, and the death toll steadily climbs.

– People simply didn’t know what to do.

They didn’t imagine the scale of what needed to be done.

And as a result of that, some of the hostages that could’ve been saved were not saved.

You know, it’s very unfortunate, it’s very sad but sometimes it’s the fact of war, you know, things do not go perfect, things don’t go perfect.

We wish they did, you know, yeah.

Every operator and every military, especially a tier one operator, what is his wish in situation like that? Of course, to save every hostage, okay.

Does it work that way every single time? Again, it’s not a movie, it’s not a reality show.

It’s reality.

And reality is very unpredictable.

– In all, 133 people die in the 2002 Dubrovka Theater siege.

Only three at the hands of the terrorists.

Nearly all the fatalities are caused by the gas used to rescue them, either overdoses or because the unconscious are mishandled.

– I think everybody understands that although 133 people died, in the circumstances, it could have been a thousand.

The full scale of the tragedy could have been very different.

I was miserable.

It was a real tragedy.

– Because of the tragedy, the Alfa teams involved don’t call the operation a success.

– The only success was the killing of the terrorists and that the majority of people were still alive, but, generally, it was not a success because more than 100 people died.

It’s not that we didn’t work hard enough.

It wasn’t because of bad planning.

It wasn’t Alfa’s fault.

We don’t feel proud of what we did because it’s our job.

– The deaths become all the more poignant when it’s revealed that the giant bombs in the theater were fakes all along.

And some of the black widows’ belts were duds.

Even though Alfa themselves were unaware of this at the time, it leaves the impression that the use of the gas and the deaths that it caused had all been for nothing.

Media observers start talking about the operation as a tragedy.

– So a 130 some hostages die and it’s a tragedy? Absolutely, huge tragedy to every single family that lost loved one.

It would have been a little bit bigger tragedy, thousand of them dying in a few huge explosions.

And in the long run, it would have been an even bigger tragedy if a state, a country, succumbs to the demands.

And people like that, capable to do something like that, achieve what they want to achieve.

– The irony is plain to all that the expertise of the military is only mirrored by the failures of the civilian rescue effort.

In the years that follow the Dubrovka Theater siege, the families of the hostages who died, and many hostages themselves campaign for compensation and continue trying to get justice.

The precise details of the gas used have never been revealed despite repeated requests from doctors treating survivors.

But Alfa’s achievement remains unblemished by the siege.

– It didn’t really tarnish the reputations of the special forces themselves.

It instead was regarded, as it were, that the fighting men did their job, it was the Kremlin, it was the administration, it was everyone else who in fact let them down.

– Today in the eyes of most Russians, Spetsnaz Group Alfa are the heroes of the Dubrovka Theater siege.

– For the kind of liberal antigovernment protestors who are marching in the streets of Moscow, it shows how the Kremlin is brutal, heavy-handed, doesn’t mind letting people die as long as it kills its enemies.

To be honest, though, for the majority of Russians, actually what Dubrovka says is that Russia is still strong and determined, and if you mess with Russia, then you can expect a devastating response.

– the extraordinary achievement of Spetsnaz Group Alfa at Dubrovka stands unchallenged as one of the most daring and technically brilliant operations ever undertaken to break a siege and counter terrorism.

Among the world’s special forces, Spetsnaz Group Alfa enjoy an outstanding reputation.

But the Soviet legacy and Russia’s unique approach to counterterrorism have created a specialist force unlike any other.

An asset appreciated both domestically and internationally.

– Alfa remains today, the pre-eminent Russian special forces unit, beyond any shadow of a doubt.

They really are pretty much at the absolute top tier of, obviously, the world’s special forces rankings, particularly when it comes to individual, personal combat skills, shooting, killing people with their bare hands, that kinda thing, they really are at the top.

And just in terms of pure individual physical toughness as well.

– Alfa’s fight to assert its integrity after years of political interference has triumphed.

Once again, it’s proved itself the defender of the Russian people.