Chechen Rebels Vow "Serious Measures" If Demands Not Met

Anna Politkovskaya, one of those who have negotiated with the 40 some rebels, said, ”We were constantly told that if they were not provided with a concrete plan to withdraw Russian troops from Chechnya they threatened to take the most serious measures at five, six or seven in the morning.”

“The president must say himself that he is ending the war, they need his word. This is the first thing,” she told reporters after speaking to the hostage-takers. “The second thing is that from one of the regions in Chechnya, the troops must be withdrawn as an example of what is to follow.”

Prior to the announcement of demands, Russian President Vladimir Putin went on national television Friday evening and said he was open to talks with Chechen guerrillas, but under his terms.

“We are open to any kind of contacts,” Putin said in his second set of televised comments since the attack.

He insisted that past conditions stood, notably that separatists lay down their weapons. Moscow also rejects any idea of independence for Chechnya.

Politkovskaya said the guerrillas intended to stay inside the theater to the bitter end, and were expecting it to be stormed eventually by Russian forces.

“They have not made any demands for money and there will not be any,” she said. “They came here to die and they are waiting for the storming to die in battle.”

She added that the “suicide squad” rebels, who are armed with automatic weapons and grenades, and have rigged the building with explosives, also have a telephone and a television inside.

After Politkovskaya issued her statement on Friday, one of the rebels told Reuters that they had no intention of freeing more of their captives. Earlier in the day, rebels freed 19 hostages, bringing to the total number of hostages released to about 58. Approximately 70 foreign captives, including three Americans, remain in the theater.

The Chechen gunmen killed one of the hostages on Wednesday, a woman who had tried to escape as the separatists took over. Sergei Ignachenko, a spokesman for the Federal Security Service, told the Associated Press the woman looked to be in her 20s and had been shot in the chest. Two others successfully fled the theater despite having grenades launched at them by the rebels.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Russian police and soldiers have surrounded the building, but have not yet moved against the hostage-takers.

President Vladimir Putin, who rose to power three years ago pledging to clamp down on the decade-old rebellion on Russia’s southern fringe and boost public security, said the main task was to secure the hostages’ safe release.

The Russian president has taken an uncompromising stand on the conflict in largely Muslim Chechnya on Russia’s southern fringes, where the Kremlin has twice launched military strikes to crush separatists.

Russia accuses the Arab fighters in Chechnya of links to radical Islamist groups like the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, the group blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S.

The Moscow hostage situation is the most violent attack within Russia since the first Chechen war that lasted from 1994 to 1996, when rebels killed some 120 people after seizing a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budennovsk. In 1996 a Chechen group took more than 2,000 people hostage in a raid on the nearby Dagestani town of Kizlyar.