Morning of 26 October
During the night, Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen envoy and associate of the separatist President Aslan Maskhadov, appealed to the extremists and asked them to "refrain from rash steps". The hostage takers told the BBC that a special representative of President Putin planned to come to the theater for talks the next day. Two members of the Spetznaz Alpha Group moving around in the no-man's land were seriously wounded by a grenade fired from the building by the terrorists, which was blamed by the Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin on the media news leak.
According to an officer in the Russian special forces cited by The Guardian, the leak was controlled: "We leaked the information that the storming would take place at three in the morning. The Chechen fighters were on their guard. They began shooting, but there was no raid. Then there was the natural reaction — a relaxation. And at 5 a.m. we stormed the place."
Read more about this topic: Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis
Famous quotes containing the words morning and/or october:
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