- MOSCOW (UPI) -- Some 700 theater-goers, taken
hostage by several dozen Chechen rebels, reportedly began receiving food
and water supplies, but there were no significant breakthroughs in negotiations
between the militants and authorities, RIA Novosti news agency reported
Friday.
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- The agency quoted Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev
as saying that the supplies were secured amid ongoing talks by journalist
Anna Politkovskaya with the armed militants who commandeered the theater
Wednesday.
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- The state-owned RTR television network reported that
the supplies were limited to juice and water as the hostage-takers refused
to allow food in. They also refused to let a car with food supplies and
water approach the building, requesting Politkovskaya to carry bottles
of water and juice.
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- The raiders chose to speak with Politkovskaya, a journalist
with Moscow's Novaya Gazeta, who in recent years has traveled throughout
Chechnya and irked Russia's military chiefs with lengthy reports of the
local population's mistreatment by federal troops.
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- On Friday, Politkovskaya was accompanied by Leonid Roshal,
the chairman of the children's urgent surgery and trauma department of
the Russian Academy of Medical Science, who spent the previous night talking
to the terrorists and managed to negotiate the release Friday of eight
children ages 6-12. The group included seven Russian children and a 10-year-old
Swiss girl.
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- Russian negotiators have requested the hostage-takers
to release the remaining children and youths ages 12 to 18 -- a request
denied by the terrorists who insist the upper age limit is 12.
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- On Friday, Politkovskaya and Roshal also brought a wheelchair
into the theater, apparently to help out a hostage who had suffered appendicitis,
RIA Novosti reported.
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- The state-owned Mayak radio station said that at least
15 people with explosives attached to their bodies were patrolling the
theater aisles as others stood guard in the basement and theater balconies,
monitoring routes of a potential storming of the building by Russian forces.
The militants have threatened to blow up the building if an attack is made.
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- FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev promised the hostage-takers
Friday that their lives would be guaranteed if they agreed to release the
hostages.
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- The rebels balked Friday on an earlier promise to release
seized foreigners, who include three U.S. citizens and a few dozen other
people.
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- Russian authorities said they had evidence that the raid
was masterminded by Chechen independence leader Aslan Maskhadov. Officials
also said they had a video tape containing footage of Maskhadov saying
that an "operation is being prepared that will overturn the course
of the Chechen war," FSB spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko said.
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- According to Ignatchenko, the tape had been recorded
several days ahead of Wednesday's raid. The official added that the tape
may be handed over to journalists after being studied by the experts in
the operative headquarters.
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- A spokesman for the operative headquarters said Friday
that interceptions of the terrorists' cell-phone calls -- to places in
Chechnya, Turkey and a number of Arab countries -- indicated that Maskhadov
was directing the raid.
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- "This link is undeniable," the spokesman said.
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- Police officials attempted Friday to establish contact
with Maskhadov but failed.
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- The link between Maskhadov and the leader of the group
that took over the theater -- Movsar Barayev -- was reportedly apparent
from an interview that Barayev gave in the theater to a Sunday Times correspondent
Thursday in which Barayev admitted that he was in touch with Maskhadov.
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- The gang leader insisted he and his men didn't consider
themselves terrorists.
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- "If we were terrorists, we'd have demanded money
or a plane and the only thing we're asking is to stop the war in Chechnya,"
the journalist quoted Barayev as saying.
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- On Friday, authorities identified the woman who was killed
Thursday under yet unexplained circumstances as Olga Romanova, 26, who
lived in the street across the theater.
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- Meanwhile Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin sternly
warned against any displays of violence against ethnic Chechens in Russia
after reports from the central Russian city of Tver where angered ethnic
Russian residents threatened to launch pogroms on the city's Chechen community.
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- "The Chechens, as well as our other countrymen,
protect the interests of Russia and the future of their republic, said
Putin who called potential outbreaks of violence against the Chechen community
intolerable.
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- "Many of them are doing that in Chechnya, with arms
in their hands and sometimes putting their own lives at stake."
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- Putin condemned the hostage-takers, who he said were
trying to sow the seeds of inter-ethnic hatred.
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- In a separate incident, Moscow prosecutor's office arrested
a 27-year-old ethnic Chechen man on suspicion of being linked to Saturday's
blast of an abandoned car near a McDonald's restaurant in southwest Moscow.
The explosion killed one person and wounded six other people.
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- The prosecutors failed to disclose the identity of the
captured man who will spend the next 10 days in jail pending further investigation
findings, Moscow Deputy Prosecutor Yuri Sinelschikov said.
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