Part 2/4
Nord-Ost siege
When: Oct. 23-26, 2002

What happened? During the staging of the “Nord Ost” play at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater, terrorists wearing suicide belts broke in and took audience members hostage.

After days of negotiations, Russian special forces used narcotic gas while storming the building, killing all the terrorists. Hostages hostages also died after inhaling the gas, however, due to the lack of adequate medical assistance. Public health services were not warned in advance, and police did not clear the nearby streets of parked vehicles, so ambulances arrived at the scene an hour-and-a-half after the start of the operation Additionally the authorities did not acknowledge the use of gas until eight hours later, and even then did not disclose what type of gas it was, so that doctors did not know how to treat the patients. The official death toll is still disputed, with figures ranging from 130 to 174 according to independent NGOs.

How did Putin use it to his advantage? Despite widespread criticism of the tactics of law enforcement, Putin backed his security services to the hilt.
“The gas was harmless and could not have caused harm to people … It’s easy to criticize the security services or the medical staff, but that’s not fair,” he said in a 2003 interview with the Washington Post.

The execution of the hostage-taking operation itself raised questions. Let's see: Forty Chechen rebels arrived in Moscow with more than 100kg of explosives, about 100 hand grenades, three heavy bombs, 18 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 20 pistols.

Journalists, rights activists and general public wondered how they managed to do this. There was no investigation. Journalists who reported critically on the incident were targeted by the Moscow regime, in one of the first examples of the aggressive censorship that would become common practice many years later. Three months later the management of NTV, the last nationwide TV channel effectively independent of the government was replaced. One month after the siege State Duma approved a broad array of "anti-terrorism legislation" ranging from far-reaching restrictions on media coverage of terrorism-related incidents to secret burials for killed terrorists, helping Putin to systematically taking control of all Russian media.

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