Special forces stormed the theater where Chechen gunmen were holding hundreds of hostages before dawn yesterday, killing their leader and dozens of other gunmen and freeing most of the captives.
The raid was accompanied by the release of sleeping gas inside the theater and many of the freed hostages who were taken to hospitals in city buses were unconscious or having clear difficulty walking.
None of the foreigners who were among the approximately 700 hostages was killed during the crisis, which began Wednesday night, Russian news agencies reported, citing diplomats at foreign missions in Moscow.
Shortly after the storming, officials said some of the estimated 50 gunmen were believed to have fled during the chaos and melted into the enormous Russian capital, but Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev told President Vladimir Putin hours later that none of the captors had escaped.
He said 32 of the gunmen were killed and an unspecified number seized. In the same meeting with Putin, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said about 30 accomplices of the gunmen had been arrested in the Moscow area, but details were not immediately available.
At least three people were killed by the gunmen inside the theater. A young woman was killed in the early hours of the crisis, although it was not clear if she was a hostage or a distraught relative who had rushed into the building. Early yesterday, officials said the captors killed two hostages and wounded two others.
The hostage-takers had earlier threatened to begin killing their captives at dawn yesterday. After the two deaths, officials reached the captors by phone but then quickly said their negotiations had failed, and the raid began.
Russian television footage from inside the theater showed the camouflage-clad body of the gunmen's leader Movsar Barayev, lying on his back amid blood and broken glass, a cognac bottle placed at one of his lifeless hands.
In the theater hall, the corpses of several of the female captors, clad in black robes and head coverings, sprawled in the red plush seats, their heads thrown back or on their folded hands, as if asleep.
Canisters loaded with explosives and metal fragments were attached to waists of some of the captors, who had threatened to blow up the theater if their demand for Russian troops' withdrawal from the rebel republic of Chechnya was not met.
Outside city Hospital 13, dozens of hostage relatives gathered waiting for word or the appearance of a treasured face.
Hostage Olga Dolotova embraced her mother Galina when she walked out, then hunched and pulled her jacket hood over head to shield herself from journalists.
Galina Dolotova said her 32-year-old daughter appeared to have been one of the hostages least affected by the gas, but even at that "she was in terrible shape" when she was brought in.
How the gas was spread through the building was not immediately known, but workers had been seen digging around sewers and steam pipes near the theater in the first day of the crisis.
There were no immediate reports of any deaths among the forces that stormed the building, the ITAR-Tass news agency said, citing a representative of the so-called "operative staff" set up to coordinate Russia's response to the crisis.
The assault on the building came on the fourth day of the crisis, after a night of heavy explosions and repeated bursts of gunfire.Sergei Ignatchenko, spokesman for the Federal Security Service, said the operation to free the hostages began when the Chechen rebels began executing the captives.
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