Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis - Day Three - 25 October

25 October

Over the course of the next day, the following people took part in negotiations with the militants: journalists Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Govorukhin and Mark Franchetti and such public figures as Yevgeny Primakov, Ruslan Aushev and again Aslambek Aslakhanov. The terrorists demanded negotiation with an official representative of Vladimir Putin. Relatives of the hostages staged anti-war demonstrations outside the theater and in central Moscow.

The guerrillas agreed to release 75 foreign citizens in the presence of diplomatic representatives of their states. Russian authorities reportedly insisted that the hostages not be separated into foreign and Russian categories. 15 Russian citizens were released, including eight children (aged 7 to 13). After a meeting with Putin, the FSB head Nikolai Patrushev offered to spare the lives of the Chechens if they released the remaining hostages unharmed.

A group of Russian doctors including Dr. Leonid Roshal, head of the Medical Centre for Catastrophes, entered the theater to bring medicine for the hostages and said the terrorists were not beating or threatening their captives. He said most of the hostages were calm and that only "two or three" of the hostages were hysterical. Some hot food, warm clothes and medicine had also been taken in by the Red Cross.

NTV channel journalists recorded an interview with Movsar Barayev, in which he sent a message to the Russian government:

We have nothing to lose. We have already covered 2,000 kilometres by coming here. There is no way back... We have come to die. Our motto is freedom and paradise. We already have freedom as we've come to Moscow. Now we want to be in paradise.

He also said the group had come to Moscow not to kill the hostages or to fight with Russia's elite troops, as they had had enough fighting in Chechnya over the years: "We came here with a specific aim — to put an end to the war and that is it."

At 9:55 p.m., four hostages (citizens of Azerbaijan) were released, bringing the total number of hostages that were set free on this day to 19.