October 25, 2002

Chechen Gunmen Threaten to Begin Killing Hostages at Dawn

Chechens holding about 600 hostages in a Moscow theater released eight children Friday and then set a dawn Saturday deadline to begin killing the rest of their captives if Russia does not agree to pull its army out of Chechnya.

The Russian government is not going to pull the army out of Chechnya and we all know that--it's not even negotiable.
Moscow time is approximately 9 hours ahead of CST here in Dallas, so around 10:00 PM tonight we should know something.
God bless these poor innocent hostages.
If there was a way for the Russian Alfa forces to go in and just take out the Chechens, I hope it will present itself to them soon.
Among the hundreds of Russian hostages are foreigners from many other countries, including 3 Americans.
In perhaps the ultimate irony, one of them is an American tourist from Oklahoma City, site of the 1995 OKC bombing which some now believe to have been perpetrated by Iraqi agents in collaboration with Tim McVeigh:
"An Oklahoma City woman, Jean Booker, said the State Department reported her son, Sandy Alan Booker, 49, who was vacationing in Russia, was among the captives. He lives in the Oklahoma capital as well."