Moscow theatre siege
On 23 October 2002, about 40 Chechen militants led by Movsar Barayev took hundreds of people hostage at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow during a performance of the musical Nord-Ost. The BBC later put the number at 912 hostages. Three days later, Russian security services pumped a gas into the hall, stormed it and killed all the attackers. In 2002 the BBC reported that "Almost all the 117 hostages who were killed... died from gas poisoning", while BBC reporting in 2012 put the toll at "some 130 hostages". ABC AM reported that Russian authorities identified the gas as a fentanyl-based anaesthetic, though the BBC reported in 2012 that its exact name and formula had never been disclosed. In December 2011 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of 64 victims.
Australian angle: during the siege, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said "up to two Australians were caught in the theatre", one of them an academic (Sydney Morning Herald). ABC AM identified a hostage as Alex Bobik, a 56-year-old Melbourne academic. He survived and spoke to the ABC as he left intensive care in a Moscow hospital. He said: "we had a lot of support from the Australian Embassy that we were in contact with continually".
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