INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Twenty years since Chechen separatists seized a crowded theatre in Moscow, spurring a hostage standoff that ended with more than one hundred
dead, the survivors remain haunted by their memories and plagued by unanswered questions.On Oct
sold-out performance of the musical "Nord-Ost."Demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, the attackers held 900 people for
three nights until Russian forces stormed the theatre in the early hours of Oct
26, 2002.Two decades on, Svetlana Gubareva, 65, can't stop thinking about the ordeal that turned out to be her final outing with her
on the floor between the rows of seats," she told AFP, recounting the moment the gunmen rushed the stage.She had met Booker, a 49-year-old
engineer from Oklahoma, on a dating site and that night they were celebrating Gubareva lodging her visa application at the United States
the audience was waiting for a highly anticipated moment in the performance that would see a large prop plane make a landing on
at the ceiling."What followed was a 57-hour siege that Gubareva constantly relives: hundreds of hostages paralyzed by fear; female militants
embassies.On the last night of the takeover, the three of them fell asleep thinking ahead to their promised release at 8 a.m
the next day.But in the early hours of Oct
26, Russian forces dispersed an unknown gas into the ventilation systems knocking out both hostages and attackers before storming the
AFP.The three-day horror was a national tragedy and sparked a moment of reckoning in Russia with questions still plaguing some of the
the Russian authorities have never been held accountable for
In 2007, investigators dropped a years-long probe into the tragedy.'My worst nightmare'Russian courts also repeatedly rejected complaints
filed by the families with the European Court of Human Rights in 2011, pressing Moscow to hold those responsible for the deaths to
account."We won't be able to avoid attacks in the future if we don't investigate past ones," Dmitry Milovidov, the head of Nord-Ost, an
association for the families of the victims, told AFP.Now 59, Milovidov lost his 14-year-old daughter in the attack.On Monday, the Kremlin
acknowledged the "pain" associated with the loss felt by Russians after repeated attacks."We've learned a lot in the fight against
terrorism, and of course we will always keep the memory of those who died as a result of these attacks, including at Nord-Ost," Kremlin
spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.But two years after the Dubrovka Theatre siege, Chechen separatists took more than a thousand people hostage
including 186 children, with Russian forces criticized for their disorderly assault on the building."By forgetting our mistakes, we make
them again," said Irina Khramtsova, a 39-year-old businesswoman, who lost her father in the Dubrovka Theatre attack."Until the authorities
learn to correct its mistakes, these attacks will happen again
And that is my worst nightmare."
