[2][3][4] Due to the layout of the theater, special forces would have had to fight through 30 metres (100 ft) of corridor and advance up a well-defended staircase before they could reach the hall in which the hostages were held.

[7] The same study pointed out that in a 2011 case at the European Court of Human Rights, the Russian government stated that the aerosol used was a mixture of a fentanyl derivative and a chemical compound with a narcotic action.

[9] During Act II of a sold-out performance of Nord-Ost a little after 9:00 PM, 40–50 heavily armed masked men and women drove in a bus to the theater and entered the main hall firing assault rifles in the air.

[24] Other well-known public and political figures such as Aslambek Aslakhanov, Irina Khakamada, Ruslan Khasbulatov, Boris Nemtsov and Grigory Yavlinsky[25] took part in negotiations with the hostage-takers.

[27] During the third day, the following people took part in negotiations with the militants: journalists Anna Politkovskaya,[28] Sergei Govorukhin and Mark Franchetti as well as public figures Yevgeny Primakov, Ruslan Aushev and again, Aslambek Aslakhanov.

[29] A group of Russian doctors including Dr. Leonid Roshal, head of the Medical Center for Catastrophes, entered the theater to bring medicine for the hostages and said the terrorists were not beating or threatening their captives.

[31] Around midnight, a gunfire incident took place as Denis Gribkov, a 30-year-old male hostage, ran over the backs of theater seats toward the female insurgents who were sitting next to a large improvised explosive device.

[citation needed] 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".

Two members of the Spetsnaz 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.

The security services pumped an aerosol anaesthetic, later stated by Russian Health Minister Yuri Shevchenko to be based on fentanyl,[38] into the theater through the air conditioning system.

[27] After nearly one and a half hours of sporadic gun battles, the Russian special forces blew open the doors to the main hall and poured into the auditorium.

None of the bodies witnessed by The Guardian correspondent Nick Paton Walsh had bullet wounds or showed signs of bleeding, but "their faces were waxy, white and drawn, their eyes open and blank.

[57] Andrei Seltsovsky, Moscow's health committee chairman, announced that all but one of the hostages killed in the raid had died from the effects of the unknown gas rather than from gunshot wounds.

[62] Military commander Shamil Basayev posted a statement on his website claiming ultimate responsibility for the incident, resigning all official positions within the Chechen government and promising new attacks.

Maskhadov said he felt responsible for those "who resorted to self-sacrifice in despair", but also said the "barbaric and inhumane policies" of the Russian leadership were ultimately to blame and criticized the storming of the theater.

[60] After the raid, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said that "the operation was carried out brilliantly by special forces;" he claimed he had wanted a negotiated end to the crisis, but the final attack was made necessary by the reported killing of hostages.

On 29 October, Vasilyev said he had the authority to state only that special chemical agents had been used and that some 30 suspected militants and their collaborators, including several civil servants and security officers, had been arrested around the theater and in other parts of the city in what Gryzlov called an "unprecedented operation" to identify what he described as a vast terrorist network in Moscow and the surrounding region.

[48] On 29 October, Putin released another televised statement, saying: "Russia will respond with measures that are adequate to the threat to the Russian Federation, striking all the places where the terrorists themselves, the organizers of these crimes and their ideological and financial inspirations are.

On 28 October, two days after the crisis, he announced that unspecified "measures adequate to the threat" would henceforth be taken in response to terrorist activity, with reports of 30 fighters killed near the Chechen capital Grozny.

[81] The Kremlin also accused the Danish authorities of "solidarity with terrorists" by allowing the meeting of about 100 Chechens, Russian human rights activists and lawmakers from Russia and other European countries to gather and discuss ways to end the fighting.

[83] Sergei Yushenkov, whose Liberal Russia party voted against the change, was quoted by Reuters as saying: "On a wave of emotion, we have in fact legitimised censorship and practically banned criticism of the authorities in emergency situations.

[86] Many in the Russian press and in the international media warned that the death of so many hostages in the special forces' rescue operation would severely damage President Putin's popularity.

[89] The Duma refused to consider a proposal by the liberal democratic Union of Rightist Forces party to form an investigative commission charged with probing the government's actions in the theater siege.

[citation needed] In June 2003, Litvinenko stated in an interview with the Australian television programme Dateline, that two of the Chechen militants involved in the siege—whom he named "Abdul the Bloody" and "Abu Bakar"—were working for the FSB, and that the agency manipulated the terrorists into staging the attack.

On the original full length tape it was evident that it had been made in late summer, not in October, and had concerned a military operation against federal forces, not an act of hostage taking.

On 8 July 2008, The Moscow Times reported[113] that the hearings at the European Court of Human Rights will be closed to the public at the request of Russian authorities as, according to Igor Trunov, they "have promised full disclosure on how they handled the crisis", including "the makeup of the knockout gas used in the storming of the theater by commandos.

"[citation needed] On 20 December 2011, the European Court of Human Rights published its judgement in the case, ordering Russia to pay the 64 applicants a total of 1.3 million euros in compensation.

The court also found that Russia had violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights when handling the hostage crisis, "with inadequate planning and conduct of the rescue operation", and with the "authorities' failure to conduct an effective investigation into the rescue operation", although the Court found that there had been "no violation of Article 2 of the Convention on account of the decision by the authorities to resolve the hostage crisis by force and to use the gas.

"[116] The Convention obliges the states to fulfill the conditions of toxic chemicals' use that allow to exclude or considerably reduce the degree of injury and gravity of consequences.

[124] Part III Episode 6 of the Netflix Spanish drama series Money Heist (La Casa de Papel) contains spoken references to the theater crisis and the use of halothane gas, with critique of Putin's indifference to the fates of the hostages and hostage-takers.