Moscow theatre raid

Police officers stand in front of the Moscow theater that was seized Oct. 23, 2002, by armed men who took the audience hostage. The Soviet-era House of Culture was staging a performance of the musical "Nord-Ost."

Some children, who were let out of the theater late Wednesday night, look through a bus window. More than 100 of the nearly 700 hostages were let go. Most were women or children.

A Special Forces sniper takes aim near the theater, where some 700 theatergoers are being held hostage. Several hostages, speaking by cell phone to Russian TV stations and news agencies, pleaded with authorities not to use force.

Special Forces and Interior Ministry troops take up their positions around the theater, where some 40 rebels are holding hundreds of theatergoers hostage. The rebels are demanding an end to the Chechen war.

On Thursday Oct. 24, as the standoff enters a second day, Russian Special Force soldiers change positions. Russian President Vladimir Putin canceled his trip this week to the APEC summit in Mexico to meet with security officials.

An armed special police force officer walks past the line of military trucks that surrounds the theater. A blanket-shrouded body, identified only as a woman, was wheeled out of the theater Thursday afternoon. She was apparently killed in the early hours of the hostage drama.

Two negotiators, one of them well-known singer Josef Kobzon (left) and four hostages - a woman and three children - leave the theater. The hostage-takers had automatic weapons, grenades, belts with explosives attached, mines and canisters with gasoline with them. One said the hostage-takers had attached explosives to themselves, theater chairs, support columns and walls, and along the aisles.

Hostage Marina Shkolnikova, a physician, holds a cell phone and hostages' letters. Three Americans are among those being held as are citizens of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Australia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Germany.

Russian Special Forces move around outside the theater. The rebels, both men and women, say they are pepared to die for their cause.

Special Forces troops are seen in the theater before it was stormed, Saturday, Oct. 26. Gunfire rattled in the theater at dawn Saturday and Russian Special Forces pumped it full of sleeping gas before troops stormed the building. Most of the 50 terrorists and 118 hostages were killed in the raid.

A Special Forces officer takes a hostage out of the theater.

A Special Forces Officer escorts an arrested Chechen rebel out the Moscow theater entrance early Saturday morning.

A bus with unidentified unconscious people, believed to be liberated hostages, leaves the theater, which was seized by Chechen rebels. Authorities still refuse to identify the gas used in the raid, but experts believe it was either vaporized valium, or BZ, which induces sleep.

In his study in Moscow's Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin reacts to news that Special Forces stormed the theater and freed hostages. Putin had said Friday that "the preservation of the lives of the people who remain in the theater building" was his overriding concern.

An unidentified woman hugs her relative, a freed hostage wearing a white sweater, as she leaves a hospital in downtown Moscow, Sunday, Oct. 27. The wail of sirens and the cries of relatives mixed outside a Moscow hospital as doctors began releasing some of the hundreds of former hostages who had been treated there after the raid.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visits victims of the theater siege at the Sklifisovski Emergency Institute, one of Moscow's clinics where freed hostages were hospitalized. The gas used by Russian troops can paralyze breathing, blood circulation, and cardiac and liver functioning, doctors said. More than 400 people, including nine children, remained in the hospital Monday.

Chechen refugees watch Russian television footage, showing the body of a female terrorist killed in the raid, in a refugee camp near Karabulak, Ingushetia.

Moscovites light candles for victims of the theater raid, during a religious service in Orthodox Pokrovsky Cathedral in Moscow.