RUSSIA: Tamara Anatolyevna (45) cannot speak. Her thoughts seem focused on the white fur rim of her hood, which she has pulled in close to her chin, as if to protect herself from the harsh Moscow winter and the harsh reality of what is happening to her son, 200 metres down the road.
Pasha is an 18-year-old student. He went to see the Russian musical, Nord Ost, a fraught tale of love and betrayal during the first World War, with his girlfriend. Pasha has no great fondness for musicals, explains Nadezhda Feodorova, a family friend, but Nord Ost was billed as the greatest show in Moscow, and so he was set on going.
At 10 o'clock on Wednesday evening, Mrs Anatolyevna heard the news on the radio. A group of 20, maybe 30, gunmen had burst onto the stage of the packed Nord Ost auditorium, reports said. Then came the phone call. It was Pasha. The call was short and subdued, almost functional. "He said: 'Mother, don't worry'", said Mrs Feodorova. "He seemed to shake with every other word." Then the call ended. Since then Mrs Anatolyevna has heard nothing, either from her son, or from the police. She is too afraid to ring his phone in case it angers his captors.
Instead she joins the hundreds of relatives, who have nothing to do except mill around a school, which has been turned into a makeshift waiting-centre at the end of Melnikova Street. The mood is bleak, the families of the 600 or more hostages trying to disguise their confusion and panic behind closed expressions, spectacles hiding raw eyes.
To Mrs Anatolyevna's left is another woman, whose red cheeks suck in lung-fulls of smoke from her endless chain smoking, as she leans against the wall, silently waving inquirers away.
Another, Mrs Feodorova (52) stands around, a polite expression masking the fear in her voice. She and her husband, Valentin, are luckier than some. Their daughter, Natalia, a 32-year-old doctor, was at the show with a friend. They have spoken to her three times. At first, she rang them. The message was short and calm. "She said: 'We are fine, Mummy. Everything is ok'," said Mrs Feodorova. "The second time, she said it was calm and quiet in the hall, that things were normal in there." Mrs Feodorova rang the third time, but cannot recall what her daughter said.
These snatched, uninformative phone calls are all the relatives have to discuss. The government has done little to provide the families with information.
The best details about the unfolding crisis come from the radio, which has been broadcasting some of the most shocking testimonies from the hostages.
Heart specialist Maria Shkolnikova made a surreptitious telephone call to a Moscow radio station to reveal that rebels had fastened explosives in passageways, on seats and even to hostages themselves. "A huge amount of explosives have been laid through the place," she whispered.
Other witnesses said the Chechens had set charges to the internal supporting columns of the theatre to prepare to carry out their threat to blow up the building if it is stormed by police.
"Some women were strapped with explosives and they said they would blow up the whole building in 10 minutes if they [police\] started to storm the building," said teenager Denis Afanasyev, after he was released with most of the younger members in the audience.
Outside the relatives are kept behind one blockade manned by young Ministry of Interior police, then ranks of troops, another blockade, and then occasional armoured personnel carriers.
At 5.40 p.m. yesterday, the body of a 20-year-old woman was brought out from the theatre by two Jordanian doctors. Russian television showed a body shrouded in a brown blanket, being steered on a hospital trolley between ambulances and fire-trucks. The young girl was the first casualty of the stand-off, which has presented President Putin with the steepest challenge of his 30-month career, and returned the conflict in the breakaway Chechnya republic to the forefront of world events.
The brazen attack took the world by surprise. At 9.40, Alexei, who lives to the left of the theatre, had finished walking his dog. From his fifth floor flat, the 45- year-old hydro-electric engineer heard automatic gunfire and explosions, and rushed to his window. A white minibus, its engine still running, was parked askew in the theatre forecourt. Then people started fleeing. At first there were 10, then 20 women, children and Muslims, freed by the gunmen who had showed their hostages the mines strapped to their chests. Witnesses later said they threatened to kill 10 theatre-goers for every gunman slain, if Russian Special Forces stormed the building.
Police cleared the street in front of the theatre. Snipers positioned themselves on the rooftops opposite. There was a crack of gunfire at midnight, then a silence, and security officers became relaxed on the theatre forecourt, strolling between sniper positions.
But at 9 a.m. the calm was shattered by an explosion inside the building. A team from the Red Cross, a camera crew from Ren TV, and a British journalist, Mark Franchetti from the Sunday Times, were invited into the building in the afternoon. They made no comment on emerging hours later, but a hostage, called only Anna, told Russian television: "I want to tell you the appeal of thousands of Russians to the government. We are waiting for our President's decision. We are waiting for them to keep their promise of non-violence. Because any use of force will bring irreparable consequences. We are sitting here waiting for death. It is very real for us." - (Guardian Service)