MOSCOW - Chechen guerrillas holding hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater said in a videotape yesterday that they were prepared to die and take the "souls of the infidels" with them, even as they released five hostages and the body of a woman they killed in the theater.
The group of about 30 fighters, working with remarkable discipline, threatened to shoot the remaining captives, who numbered about 600, and blow up the theater unless the Russian government capitulated to their demands to stop assaults on rebel forces in Chechnya, negotiate with its separatist government and eventually withdraw all Russian troops.
Early today, a security official said the rebels agreed to release all 75 foreigners they were holding captive, the Associated Press reported.
Embassies were being requested to send representatives to the scene to meet their freed citizens, Federal Security Service spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko said. The foreigners included citizens of the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Australia, Azerbaijan and Germany.
The rebels did not say they planned to release the hundreds of Russian hostages.
Until now, many Russians had managed to ignore the war, which has been grinding on in an apparent stalemate while killing scores of Russians and Chechens a month.
Suddenly, though, the battle has moved from the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains to a Moscow theater less than three miles from the Kremlin.
The seizure occurred about 9 p.m. Wednesday when the guerrillas arrived in a convoy of jeeps, ran on stage, fired shots into the air and announced they were taking hostages.
According to a rebel Web site, the guerrillas are led by Movsar Barayev, nephew of warlord Arbi Barayev, who reportedly died last year. Some Chechen separatists, who say the movement has been hurt by criminal gangs acting in their name, already regarded the Barayev clan as a radical faction.
The body of a 20-year-old Russian woman was shown on television being carried out on a stretcher. She was shot in the chest as she tried to flee yesterday, according to the Federal Security Service.
Russian news media reported that a guerrilla fired a grenade launcher at two other women yesterday as they scrambled to freedom. One was wounded.
Neither the government of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin nor leaders of Chechnya's Russian-backed regime seemed ready to make concessions.
Appearing on television yesterday afternoon, Putin called the seizure of the hostages one of the largest terror attacks in history. He charged that it was planned in "one of the foreign terrorist centers."
He did not say where that might be or who is behind the assault. Russian military officials say the Chechen separatists are financed by radical Islamic groups.
No change in tactics
Sulyan Makmoyev, deputy mayor of Grozny, predicted in an interview in Moscow that there would be no halt to military operations, including the infamous "cleansing operations" by Russian troops - house-to-house searches of entire villages which, human rights groups say, frequently lead to the disappearance and death of young men caught in the dragnet.
"Nothing will change in tactics in Chechnya," Makmoyev said.
A spokesman for the separatist government said it was not to blame for the hostage-taking.
"What's happening now is a desperate attempt of an independent-acting group," said the spokesman, Aslambek Kadiev, in an interview with BBC-TV in London. "It's not true that the Chechens are connected to any terrorist organization."
In Washington, the White House issued a statement denouncing the takeover: "There are no causes or national aspirations that justify the taking of innocent hostages."
Relatives of the hostages were left feeling powerless. Anatoly Andiranov stood yesterday among a score of other red-eyed, chain-smoking Russians at a trade school a short distance from Moscow's Melinkov theater - the former Palace of Culture for Moscow's Ball-Bearing Factory - where Andiranov's 32-year-old daughter and the other hostages are being held.
"Today we are crying," said Andrianov, 58. "But in the future, mothers in Rostov and Khabarovsk" - widely scattered Russian cities - "will cry, too. This civil war should be stopped. You should say this to the whole world."
Plea from prisoner
Hours after Andrianov spoke, his daughter, Anna, a reporter for Komsomolskaya Pravda, talked to a radio station from the theater on her cell phone. She pleaded with authorities not to storm the theater, where guerrillas had reportedly wired explosive charges to chairs, columns and themselves.
"We are afraid that there will be attempts to free us, and this will kill us," Andrianova said.
Dmitry Yefimenko, whose son, Igor, 19, is a hostage, kept a vigil at the technical school. He, too, called for the government to meet the guerrillas' demands.
"If there was no war, this would not have happened," he said. "All people of the world, Americans too, help us, please."
But the family members of some hostages privately said they hoped the government would crack down on what they regarded as terrorism. A 24-year-old man whose mother is being held by the guerrillas bitterly called for tougher measures against the Chechens.
"Before, I didn't think that Chechnya was a very bad place" and that Chechens were not bad people, said Alexi, who asked that his last name not be used, to protect his mother. "Today I think this is the race of evil."
Most of those waiting for news of loved ones yesterday, though, simply seemed dazed by the arrival of a distant war in a quiet Moscow neighborhood.
The Qatar-based satellite TV channel Al-Jazeera transmitted statements yesterday by some of the hostage-takers, who said thousands of their comrades stood ready to die for the Chechen cause.
"I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living," a black-clad male said on the videotape. "Each one of us is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of God and the independence of Chechnya."
"Even if we are killed, thousands of brothers and sisters will come after us, ready to sacrifice themselves," said a woman in the group, only her eyes peering from a head-to-toe black robe. According to a guerrilla Web site, some of the women are the widows of Chechen fighters, prepared to seek vengeance for the loss of their husbands.
Iosif Kobzon, a member of the Duma, the lower house of parliament, was part of a delegation that approached the theater with a white flag and met with six masked guerrillas about 1:30 p.m. yesterday. The group later relayed the hostage-takers' demands to the Kremlin.
Kobzon told reporters the guerrillas appeared prepared for a police assault. "I spoke to a woman who had a remote-control device in her hands, and she said she could blow up the place," he said, according to the Interfax news agency.
Another negotiator, Irina Khakamada, deputy speaker of the Duma, said in a television interview that the guerrillas appeared to be young, polite and well-trained. They were so relaxed they cracked a few jokes.
Five released
Shortly after negotiators emerged, the guerrillas released a woman, three children and a British man in his 60s who was said to be ill. He was taken to the hospital, the Russian media reported.
Those remaining in the building were theater-goers, actors, stage hands and other staff.
Four miles from the theater, about 100 members of Moscow's small, tightly knit Chechen community gathered yesterday outside federal government offices, preparing to hold a meeting about to what to do next.
"They are ready to take the place of the hostages themselves," said Akhmad Khadyrov, the chief of the Russian-backed government in Chechnya. "They are also ready to take guns into their hands, if they are allowed to do so, and protect the hostages."
Shuddi Magamayev, who fled Chechnya in 1996, also showed up for the meeting. He denounced the storming of the theater, but he said Chechens feel justified in seeking independence.
"Any national minority would say yes to independence, rather than staying in Russia, where we are beaten, where our families are murdered," he says. "We consider it terrorism against a whole nation. The nation is going to be exterminated completely."
Khadyrov was reportedly prepared to try to talk with the guerrillas. But in the videotape that aired later on Al-Jazeera, one of the fighters called for "the head of Khadyrov."
Russian television reported last night that the Chechen official changed his mind, deciding against approaching the theater.
The musical playing at the Melinkov, Nord-Ost - German for Northeast - is based on a well-known Soviet-era novel called The Two Captains. The adventure-romance features a hero who becomes an arctic pilot to find out what went wrong on during a polar expedition years earlier. The show is especially popular with younger Russians, many of whom have newfound feelings of national pride and patriotism.
Hostility, beatings
Feelings against Chechens appeared to be running high in Russia. An official in the Russian-backed Chechen government, who asked that his name not be used, said 10 Chechens were arrested and beaten by Moscow police after the hostage-taking. A man from the Caucasus was beaten by young Russian men at Petrovsko-Razumovskaya Metro station, NTV television reported.
Schools near the theater were closed, troops patrolled some nearby streets, snipers appeared on roofs. But a few blocks away, life in Moscow went on pretty much as usual.
Russia fought Chechen separatists from 1994 to 1996, in a war that inflicted terrible losses on Russia and left the Chechen capital, Grozny, in ruins. After a negotiated settlement, the Russians withdrew.
But the Chechens fought bitterly among themselves for power in the quasi-independent state. Criminal gangs and kidnapping for profit flourished. Russian authorities then blamed Chechen rebels for a series of apartment building bombings in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia that killed more than 300 people.