Stunned Russians mourned the victims of the country's latest deadly disaster yesterday amid anger that nearly all the 118 captives who died in a hostage crisis at a Moscow theater were killed by the gas spread through the building before special forces stormed in.
Top Moscow doctors said Sunday that the 116 who died after the Russian raid were victims of the gas, a compound that remained secret even to medical workers fighting to save people weakened after 58 hours in the thrall of their Chechen rebel captors.
Another 405 of the freed captives remained hospitalized yesterday, including nine children, while 239 have been released, the Moscow Health Department said.
President Vladimir Putin declared yesterday an official day of mourning amid rising criticism over the number of hostages killed in the operation and the way they died. Russian authorities have said 50 hostage-takers were killed.
To many Russians, it seemed shortly after the pre-dawn raid that deaths among the hostages were minimal: Officials boasted of a successful operation but said it was too early to tell how many were killed, and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov later said 30 might have died.
But that afternoon, authorities announced that 67 hostages were killed, and by evening the number had risen above 90, as desperate relatives waited outside hospitals for word about their family members who had been held. On Sunday, authorities said the toll was 118.
The special forces who spread the gas before storming into the theater did not tell city health authorities exactly what the substance was, chief Moscow doctor Andrei Seltsovsky told a news conference Sunday.
That apparently left doctors and emergency workers struggling in confusion to minister to the more than 750 hostages who were delivered to city hospitals, mostly unconscious.
Seltsovsky said medical personnel were familiar with the general category of the gas, which causes people to lose consciousness and can be used to anesthetize surgical patients, but had not been told its name.
The gas can paralyze breathing, cardiac and liver function and blood circulation, the doctors said. The effects were worsened by the extreme conditions in which the hostages had been confined -- next to no movement, lack of water, food and sleep, severe psychological stress -- and by chronic medical problems some suffered.
"In standard situations, the compound that was used on people does not act as aggressively as it turned out to [in this case]," Seltsovsky said.
In addition to the 116 who died of the effects of the gas, authorities said one woman was shot and killed in the early hours of the crisis and a man was killed by a gunshot to the head early Saturday. Shortly after the raid, officials had said they were provoked into starting the operation to free the hostages when the rebels killed two people.
The attackers burst into the theater Wednesday night during a performance of the popular musical Nord-Ost, some with explosives strapped to their bodies. They included 18 women.
They mined the theater and threatened to blow it up unless Putin withdrew Russian troops from Chechnya.
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