Russia: 20 years since the tragedy of the Dubrovka theater – “For me, everything is over”

20 years ago the Russia and the whole world watched with bated breath as Russian special forces surrounded a theater where they were being held hostages of almost 1,000 people. The siege ended in tragedy and it still provokes objections. It was October 23, 2002, when 40 Chechen fighters led by warlord Movsar Barayev took 912 hostages in Dubrovka theater in Moscow,which featured the popular musical Nord-Ost. The development of the terrorist attack is watched by millions of TV viewers for two days and three nights, until the attack of the Russian special forces who neutralize the explosives and save a large part of the hostages. However, the gas used by Russian special forces during the operation, unknown composition, causes death 125 people, including 10 children. Five more hostages are executed by the terrorists.

“For me, it’s all over”: twenty years after hostages were taken at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater by a Chechen death squad, the former hostages are still talking about the tragedyia with 130 dead and they wonder about the “forgotten mistakes”.

For 20 years, Svetlana Gubareva, 65, can’t stop thinking about that night she went to the theater with her 13-year-old daughter and her American fiance Sandy. That day, Svetlana and Sandy Alan Booker, a 49-year-old engineer from Oklahoma whom she had met through a dating site, wanted to celebrate filing a visa application at the American embassy in Moscow. And they bought the last three tickets to the music show.

57 hour siege

At the beginning of the second act, the audience is waiting for the scene of the landing of a plane, which is the talk of all Moscow. But instead, masked men in camouflage uniforms take the stage and shoot into the air. Three years after the Vladimir Putin has unleashed the second Chechen war, the threat of terrorist acts is in the air, but Svetlana thinks for a moment that masked gunmen are part of the show.

“Sandy understood better than I did what was going on and pushed us to the floor between the seats,” she says. Finally, the Chechen contingent, consisting of twenty men and women, announces its request: the withdrawal of Russian military forces from Chechnyareports the Athens News Agency.

A few days later, Sergei Yushenkov was murdered in an armed attack. Khanpasha Terkibaev was later killed in a traffic accident in Chechnya. They were followed by Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in October 2006, and Alexander Litvinenko, murdered in London in November 2006. Mikhail Trepaskin is a lawyer, former FSB agent, dissident. He was jailed for his investigation into the eponymous 1999 Russian apartment block bombings that killed 300, terrorized the country and, with remarkable automation, led to Putin’s surge in popularity, his rise to power and a second war of Chechnya.

Sergei Kovalev, politician and dissident, died in 2021 at the age of 91 in his sleep.

Source: News Beast

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