Moscow reveals the nature of the gas

“Opium-based anesthetic”

MOSCOW – An opium-based anesthetic. After days of doubt and controversy, tonight, for the first time, the Russian government reveals the nature of the gas used by leatherheads to knock out the Chechen kidnappers of the Dubrovka theater and free the 800 hostages, 117 of whom died of their own gas intoxication (two more, instead, for gunshot wounds). Not a lethal substance or prohibited by international conventions – one of the many assumptions made these days – but a gas based on fentanyl, an opium-based anesthetic: Health Minister Alexander Shevchenko has officially announced it.

The fentanyl-based gas, an opiate, was introduced into the theater by Russian special forces to numb terrorists, but its indirect effects (and perhaps, according to media reports, delays in relief) also caused the death of 117 hostages on about 800.

The gas used in any case cannot in itself “cause death”, said the minister, stressing that it is a “anesthetic” substance commonly used in operating rooms in the surgical field. So how did those 117 die? “The fatal outcome” for some hostages, according to the minister, “is linked to the fact that it was used against people who were in conditions of dehydration, malnutrition, lack of oxygen, enormous psychological stress and forced immobility “.

Shevcenko, on the other hand, denied that the doctors involved in the rescue had not been warned “of a possible operation” and stated that the health workers had been equipped “with more than a thousand doses of antidote”. Finally, the minister reiterated that during the blitz “no substance prohibited by international conventions” was used. This point was also underlined by the spokesman of the Foreign Ministry, Aleksandr Iakovenko.

October 30, 2002