On a rainy Wednesday night in October, hundreds of people attended a musical at the Ball Bearing Factory Theater in Moscow. The show is a romantic love story set in Stalin’s Russia. As the audience adjusted for the second half of the show, dozens of heavily armed men and women arrived at the theater in three vans laden with explosives. The attackers destroyed the foyer with guns and stormed the building.
In the auditorium, the audience watched the performance quietly and heard nothing. The performance that night was recorded by the theater’s cameras as usual. Audio and video were cut as the gunmen sealed off the auditorium. The audience heard terrorist leader Movsar Barayev announce that if Russian troops did not leave Chechnya, he would order his supporters to blow up the theater and everyone in it. Meanwhile, police have cordoned off surrounding streets. Inside the theater, a hostage used her mobile phone to call a local radio station.
The Suicide Squad consists of 22 men and 19 women. The woman’s job was to watch over the hostages and detonate the explosives attached to them when ordered to do so. It was clear from the outset that the Kremlin, humiliated by such an audacious attack, would never bow to Chechnya’s demands. Relatives and friends prayed for the rescue of the hostages, but everyone expected a bloody massacre.
The Russians cannot deploy their forces until they have a better understanding of what awaits them in the theater. Several children, some Muslims and two pregnant women were released, but no one dared to enter. Then, six hours after the siege, a young woman was seen walking across the theater’s parking lot. No one knew who she was or how she made it past the cordon.
As dawn broke on Thursday morning, there was still no sign of a Russian counterattack. Minutes passed in the theater. In a quiet moment, the shooter used the camera to focus on his leader. Movsar Barayev, 25, is the nephew of a notorious Chechen rebel. To the embarrassment of the Russians, they claimed to have killed him ten days earlier in Chechnya.
Despite the Arabic slogans and Saudi-inspired women’s clothing, the terrorists were local Chechens, with one exception – a Gulf Arab volunteer who shaved off his bushy beard so as not to be seen on the streets of Moscow.
As the Chechens grew more assertive, they allowed some Russian representatives into the theater. Later that day, two doctors volunteered to go in. Before they can treat the hostages, they must bring out the body of the terrorists’ first victim. She is a 26-year-old saleswoman who lives nearby.
