MOSCOW — Heavily armed Chechens holding about 700 people hostage at a Moscow theater released the body of a woman they had shot to death and fired grenades Thursday at two other captives who escaped, ratcheting up tensions with the Russian government.
Even as attempts at negotiations lurched, the rebels threatened to kill 10 people each hour if their demand for an end to the 3-year-old war in Chechnya was not met, said two reporters for an Italian news agency who were released from captivity Thursday.
Hundreds of heavily armed Russian troops, police officers and special forces soldiers encircled the theater. Inside the main hall, nerves began to fray, a hostage said by cell phone. The Chechens refused police offers of food but were providing hostages with water and chocolate. At least three of the hostages are Americans.
The Chechens, who seized the theater Wednesday night during a performance of one of Moscow’s most popular musicals, gave Russia a seven-day deadline to pull out of Chechnya, according to a pro-rebel Web site, kavkaz.org.
Russian President Vladimir Putin broke his public silence about the crisis, saying the Russian government would exercise “maximum safety” in working for the release of the hostages. At the same time, he vowed not to give into the group’s “provocations” and said the raid was an act of international terrorism planned by “overseas
terrorism centers.”
A spokesman for Aslan Maskhadov, who was the Chechen president when Russian troops stormed back into the territory in October 1999, said his government was not responsible for the hostage-taking.
Public support has been flagging for the war, which has ground down into a deadly stalemate of hit-and-run attacks by Chechens on civilian and military targets and crackdowns by the Russian army that even pro-Moscow Chechens deem abusive.