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CounterPunch
October
28, 2002
Putin's Gas:
115 Hostages Killed by Russian Poison Gas
by PATRICK COCKBURN
MOSCOW. The dreadful truth about the end of the Moscow
theatre siege was becoming clear yesterday. The secret gas,
pumped into the building to knock out the Chechen rebels and
allow crack Russian troops to storm the building just before
dawn on Saturday, killed scores of hostages and caused many
others to slip into a coma.
Andrei Seltsovsky, Moscow's most senior
doctor, said last night that 115 of the 117 hostages who died
as the siege ended were killed by the gas. Only two died of
gunshot wounds. Nearly 650 hostages remained in hospital, 150
of whom were in intensive care, with 45 said to be in "grave
condition". Out of the 117 dead, Dr Seltsovsky said only
53 had been identified.
Despite the rising death toll, the Russian
government was refusing to reveal details of the gas used in
the assault, referring to it only as "a special substance".
In the hours immediately after the end of the siege, the official
Russian position was that many of the victims had died of heart
attacks, shock, or lack of medicine for pre-existing ailments.
Dr Seltsovsky said: "In standard
situations, the compound that was used on people does not act
as aggressively as it turned out to do. But it was used on people
who were in a specific [extreme] situation for more than 50
hours." Moscow's chief anaesthesiologist, Yevgeny Yevdokimov,
said he was unable to identify the gas but suggested it was
a "narcotic substance similar to a general anaesthetic
in surgery". It can paralyse breathing, cardiac and liver
functioning, and blood circulation.
According to other sources, the gas,
so powerful that it caused the Chechen gunmen to fall unconscious
even before they could pull the triggers on their bombs, was
developed by the FSB security service. But the agency, the successor
to the KGB, is refusing to tell doctors the identity of the
gas or provide an antidote. The gas was secretly pumped into
the theatre at about 5.30am after two hostages had been killed.
As the number of dead hostages--on Saturday
put at 67--rose by the hour, the mood of people milling around
outside the gates of hospitals became more and more frantic.
All had relatives caught in the theatre who, along with their
Chechen captors, fell unconscious after inhaling the gas.
Yelena Buchkova, tears streaming down
her face as she stood on the steps of the Sklifosovsky medical
institute, held out a photograph of a fair-haired young man.
"It is my son Alexei, such a good boy," she said between
sobs. "I can't find him in the hospitals or in the mortuary.
Maybe he is in a coma because of the gas and they don't know
his name."
Ever since she heard about the Russian
assault, Mrs Buchkova had gone from hospital to hospital in
Moscow vainly searching for Alexei. "Nobody will say anything
or let us in and we have to plead for somebody to come to the
door to look at the photograph," she complained.
At the Sklifosovsky Hospital only a few
relatives were allowed inside after their passports were checked
and then only to see doctors. None was allowed to see the former
hostages.
The first two hostage deaths attributed
to the gas were foreign nationals. Russian NTV television quoted
Dutch and Kazakh officials, each saying that one of their nationals
had died from the effect of the gas.
The American embassy in Moscow later
demanded that Russia identify the gas used so that a US citizen
could be properly treated.
The soaring death toll, and the failure
to produce an official list of survivors, meant that relatives
were having to traipse around Moscow's many hospitals in cold,
driving rain.
"The only place they seem to be
well organised is in the mortuary," said Olga, who was
had been looking in vain for her son-in-law, Uri.
At City Clinical Hospital No 13, which
is caring for the largest number of hostages, the black iron
gates remained firmly shut. At the Sklifosovsky, the sick hostages
were being kept in a separate wing sealed off by a ring of
special forces troops. Sergei Samoylov, a journalist from the
daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, opened his jacket to show a white
medical gown underneath. "I thought I could slip in by
pretending to be a doctor," he said. "But no way. I
could not have got in even if I were invisible."
Yelena and her husband, Sergei, agreed
that the Russian authorities were right to attack the theatre
to prevent the Chechen gunmen blowing it up, killing all inside.
"It is a great thing that so many survived, but they should
have prepared to help the hostages affected by the gas,"
Sergei said.
Mr Samoylov said the government was keen
to keep charge of the former hostages for two reasons: "They
want to interrogate them to see if any are terrorists, and they
would like to keep them away from journalists so they don't
talk about what happened in the theatre." At Hospital No
13, one patient was detained on suspicion of helping the Chechens.
Most Russians accept that the government
had no alternative but to launch an all-out assault. But the
authorities' secrecy, which echoes their behaviour during the
Kursk submarine disaster two years ago, is probably caused by
embarrassment that the gas, though crucial to the attack's
success, should have killed so many of their own people.
Yesterday's
Features
Michael Wolff
A Place
of Tears
Ilija Trojanow
Bali Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
Crocodile Tears
Hope Shand and Silvia Ribeiro
The Great Containment:
GM Fallout from Mexico to Zambia
M. Junaid Alam
The Wolf Who Cried Wolf:
Charging Anti-Semitism & Extending the Iron Wall
Gavin Keeney
The Fusion Thing:
Landscape + Architecture
Adam Engel
A Good Man is Hard to Misfit
Anis Shivani
Is America Becoming Fascist?
Jason Leopold
Is Thomas White Fit to Lead the Army?
Philip Farruggio
Let Them Eat (Crumb) Cake
Josh Frank
The Grassroots of Hope
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: episode 5
Night School
M. Shahid Alam
The Civilizing Mission
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
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in the Tunnels;
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- Ashcroft's Gays: the War on Free Speech;
- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
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