The Operation -The Released Hostages -The Storming -The Dead

The Operation

 In the early hours of Thursday, October 24, 2002, a group of Chechen fighters seized a theatre in Moscow, taking several hundred hostages. With bombs placed in different parts of the theatre, the fighters had bombs attached to their bodies and threatened to blow up the place if Russian security forces tried to storm the building.

The Chechen group demanded an end to the genocide taking place in their homeland on the part of the Russian military and a withdrawal of Russian forces from their soil. The fighters, including 20 women widowed in the war in Chechnya, said that the “The Russians have drowned our country in the blood of our sons.”

This is the first operation by Chechen fighters to set an alarm to Russian observers that the war in Chechnya has in fact reached Moscow.