MOSCOW - After being held hostage for 57 hours by Chechen guerrillas in a Moscow theater and gassed by Russian special forces, Yakhar Neserkoyeva faced one more crisis. She was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist.
Investigators said the groggy 42-year-old economist gave "inadequate" answers during an interrogation in a Moscow hospital in the hours after the crisis, which began Oct. 23 and ended Oct. 26. But the basic reason for her detention may be simpler: Neserkoyeva is Chechen.
After two days in a hospital for prisoners, the Moscow woman spent eight more days locked up with thieves and drug addicts in a four-person cell in a district police headquarters. She was held even though she had been invited to the theater that night by Russian friends and despite the efforts of the Russian-backed government of Chechnya to win her release.
"I knew I was completely innocent, but I had doubts," she said in her first interview after her release from custody. "Maybe they would find some coincidences. Maybe they would not believe me."
Neserkoyeva - known as Yakhi to friends - was among thousands of Chechens living in Moscow and other Russian cities to run afoul of police, who have become deeply suspicious of all Chechens since the hostage-taking. It was more of the same for the Chechens, who had already been subject to frequent document checks and demands for bribes by police.
"Yakhi's case demonstrates that this event doesn't have some nationalistic flavor," said her lawyer, Stanislav Markelov. "All nationalities, including Chechens, suffered as much as the Russians."
Chechen guerrillas seized more than 700 hostages when they stormed the theater in the Palace of Culture, a community center in southeast Moscow's Dubrovka neighborhood.
At least 128 of the hostages - and 41 of the guerrillas - died early Oct. 26 after an elite counterterror squad pumped a narcotic gas through the theater's ventilation system and came in shooting.
Among the hostages killed were citizens of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Austria, the United States and the Netherlands - as well as scores of Russians. All but five of the hostages died from complications from exposure to the gas. The others died of gunshot wounds.
Galina Mozhegova, 46, said she invited Neserkoyeva and another friend, Zhenya Koshkina, to Nord-Ost, a patriotic musical based on a Soviet-era story of arctic exploration, that chilly autumn evening.
Mozhegova, an ethnic Russian who lives in the Russian republic of Komi, 800 miles northeast of Moscow, was in Moscow for a week's visit. She has known Neserkoyeva for 25 years.
"If it wasn't for me, she would never have come to the theater that night," said Mozhegova, sitting sadly on her bed in a hospital where she was recovering from medical problems related to her rescue. She apologized for inviting Neserkoyeva to the performance.
The three friends were seated together in the 13th row of the music hall when the heavily armed Chechen militants invaded the theater, shooting over the heads of spectators. "My heart was beating so rapidly, it was as though there was a hurricane in my body," Mozhegova recalled.
From the first night, the guerrillas said they planned to release all Muslims and foreigners. Neserkoyeva's two friends urged her to tell her captors that she is Muslim and show them her internal Russian passport, which lists her place of birth. They thought she would be set free.
But Neserkoyeva was nervous. She overheard a guerrilla speaking in Chechen on a mobile phone: "The Chechens who had betrayed their motherland by leaving it, they should be shot first," the guerrilla said.
By the second day, though, the guerrillas were negotiating with a Chechen member of the lower house of parliament, the Duma. There seemed to be little danger they would hurt Neserkoyeva. And there was an increasing fear that none of the hostages would get out of the theater alive.
Her friends once again urged her to step forward to try to save herself.
"I am not going to leave you here alone," she told them, starting to cry.
"What's the point of this heroism if we both die here?" Mozhegova told her.
But Neserkoyeva still refused to go, even hiding her face from the Chechen guerillas when they passed - fearing they would recognize her ethnic background and separate her from her friends.
She called a friend from the theater on a mobile phone Oct. 25 but instructed the friend not to tell her family in Grozny, the Chechen capital. "I didn't want to worry them," she said.
Her family didn't find out that she was at the theater until five days after the hostage crisis ended.
As the gas flooded the theater during the rescue, Neserkoyeva fell asleep with her head on Mozhegova's shoulder. When the Chechen woman was carried out of the theater, her passport and other identity papers were left behind.
Mozhegova was taken to Veterans' Hospital No. 1, across the street from the theater, where she went into cardiac arrest from the effects of the gas. Now she has pneumonia. Koshkina was hospitalized and released Wednesday.
Neserkoyeva regained consciousness in Moscow Hospital No. 13 on the evening of Oct. 26, about 12 hours after troops stormed the theater
"The doctor said it was not clear by what we had been poisoned, and it was not clear how to treat us," she said.
Agents with Russia's internal security agency, the Federal Security Service, arrived at the hospital and started interrogating all of the former hostages. When they discovered Neserkoyeva is Chechen, they recorded her voice - presumably to compare with recordings of intercepted mobile phone conversations between the hostage-takers and people outside the hall.
"In the hospital, when I realized I was alive, I was thinking about my friends," she recalled. "But when I realized there was an investigation of me, I was very much scared."
Investigators tried to reassure her.
"If you are telling the truth, everything will be OK," one told her. "You will be released."
First the frail, brown-eyed Neserkoyeva was transferred to the prison hospital, then to a district police station lockup. While in jail, she listened to the radio. When she heard that many of the hostages had died, she feared that her friends might be among them.
One Moscow publication, Zhizn, reported that Neserkoyeva was one of the Chechen hostage-takers, quoting sources within the security services. But other publications raised questions about her case, linking it to anti-Chechen feeling in the wake of the hostage crisis.
And a spokesman from the Moscow office of the Russian-backed Chechen administration said his office had filed repeated protests over Neserkoyeva's detention.
Mozhegova said that when she heard her friend was being held, she waited impatiently for the security agency, the FSB, to interrogate her. Finally, Mozhegova called a television network Monday, and, in an interview broadcast that night, pleaded for the release of her friend. The next day, the FSB agents came to talk to Mozhegova.
While behind bars, Neserkoyeva heard nothing about these efforts. "I didn't have any information," she said, "but I had hope."
The FSB released Neserkoyeva 10 days after her arrest - the maximum amount of time a person can be held without charges under Russian law. The investigators who released her, she said, apologized profusely and drove her home.
Markelov, the lawyer, said her release represented a victory for the rule of law in Russia, where human rights groups have cataloged gross abuses.
"It was like a test for law-enforcement bodies, for the press and for public opinion, which would demonstrate clearly what is the priority - the law or anti-Chechen emotions," Markelov said. "And I am happy to say that the law-enforcing bodies and public opinion were on the right side."
But, he warned, Neserkoyeva could still face prosecution.
"The case is only beginning," the lawyer said. "I hope that the worst is over. But I am very careful to say that any injustice can still happen."