RUSSIA: Tense, red-eyed, and sometimes collapsing into sobs, they stand outside City Hospital number 13, pleading for news. A lucky few know their loved ones are among the 340 patients inside, and occasionally a shout goes up from the street as a face appears at an upper window and family members wave to each other, enjoying a visual, if not a physical, embrace.
But most of the crowd that milled around outside the high iron railings in a light drizzle yesterday were not so fortunate in getting news of friends or family who were in the theatre on the fateful night when Chechen gunmen took them hostage.
The siege is over but the families' agony is not as hundreds of relatives are still waiting to find out whether their own family members survived.
Every released hostage was taken to hospital, regardless of his or her condition, but several hospitals received them and there is still no complete list of the survivors. "I heard she might be in here, but they give us no information," says a distraught Ms Lyuibov Kalinina, who is looking for her daughter, Lilya. "It's my second day here already. Why do they always cheat us?" She does not specify who "they" are, but in this country where individual rights have traditionally come low on the state's priorities. Holding up a small poster she has had printed with a photograph of her son and her telephone numbers, another middle-aged mother, Ms Tatyana Karpova, turns to the TV cameras and starts a desperate monologue. "My only hope is with you, not with the government. I am going to stick this poster up all over Moscow. Please help me find Sasha."
It has taken hours for some people to regain consciousness and identify themselves after the disabling gas which the special forces pumped into the building. Over 100 are dead, and some are reported to have lost their memory and so could not say who they were when they came round.
The saddest part of the information centre is the group of tables where women officials sit with lists of personal items taken from bodies which are otherwise unidentified. "Vovochka, Vovochka," shrieked a middle-aged woman suddenly, prompting everyone to turn around as she started to faint. She had just been given enough of a clue from the items found on a body to know that her son, Volodya, was in a morgue.
The lack of information has hit foreign relatives as badly as the Russian ones. Ms Natalja Zjirov, from Holland, was among the hostages who died. Peter d'Hamecourt, a Dutch TV reporter who spent all of Saturday with her husband going from hospital to hospital to ask for news, said they only learned the truth when they were shown photographs of corpses from one hospital morgue. Her husband recognised her.
Although the authorities claimed no foreigners had died, she had her Dutch passport on her.
The American embassy confirmed yesterday that two Americans were among the hostages.
Near the theatre scores of people have been laying carnations in memory of the dead. Candles flicker nearby, placed in jars to protect the flame from wind and rain. - (Guardian Service)