Some old articles on certain a topic:
Hell on Wheels
‘MK’ correspondent and doctors saved hostages
From
Moscow Komsomolets
By Dmitry Kafanov, October 28th, 2002
Just as soon as I get information that the terrorists had been neutralized, I go over to the buses that were standing ready: “Hey guys! Take me with you!” One of the drivers is suspicious, but the rest say okay…
The patrol cop hysterically waving his arms on the other side of the barricades lets us in. Around the theater façade stand dozens of ambulances with flashing lights. They start to bring out living hostages, and carry out bodies. Arms and legs waggle involuntarily, and the bodies are half naked…
The nerve-wracking situation gets worse with every passing second.
“What are you standing around for?!” shouts a cop to our driver. “Come on, load up!” A woman in an ambulance uniform jumps into our vehicle and yells at me: “Go help!” Together with the rest I begin to drag hostages into the bus. The first one is a girl with long hair a vacant stare.
“What’s your name?”
She blinks, and does not understand a thing. I pinch her cheeks: “Breathe! Breathe deep!” The girl nods and I put her in the rear seat. The next are unconscious. I do not know why, but for some reason the women have lost practically all their outer clothing.
Olya, an ambulance medic who they stick on our bus, is constantly trying to hurry the MChS (emergencies ministry) workers and policemen: “Faster, faster or we won't make it.”
We are off. The bus starts to work its way through the congestion of special-mission vehicles. Olya and I do not have time to look around.
“Stop! That one’s already cold, you won’t get anything out of him… What are you, a reporter?” she unexpectedly guesses.
There is no time to clarify our relationships. We are dashing between the unconscious people lying on the floor, throwing ourselves on one after another, doing indirect cardiac massage and artificial respiration. Two men in the front are in bad shape. We beat on them for five minutes. I hammer one of them on the face with all my might: “Breathe, you reptile! Come on, breathe, darling!”
He breathed, and even blinked. While we were working on him, a man in the rear has died.
Vasily, our driver, at first was still stopping for traffic lights.
“To Hell with them!” I yell to him. “Honk and go!”
And he does.
I count the people in the bus as I walk past them: 22. We are physically incapable of helping all of them. Olya is almost in tears: “The medicine case is still on the ambulance. All we’ve got is the first aid kit from the bus.” A thin girl, about twenty years old, slips out of the front seat. We weren’t paying attention to her…
The inside of the bus begins to smell of excrement. It is apparent that the gas used by the special services is acting on the bowels in this way. I hurry over to the girl, stepping on this or that body on the way. She is the one who was put on the bus first.
“What’s your name?”
“Yulia”
“How old are you?”
“14.”
I take down her parents’ phone number and promise to call.
Alongside sits 16 year-old Arkady, his head lolling from side to side. Next to him another young person wheezes and chokes on his saliva. I grab Arkasha’s arm and order him to hold onto his neighbor’s hair. Only about four of the twenty-two on the bus are able to react to what is going on. The rest are intoxicated and shell-shocked, but there are no signs of gunshot wounds on any of them…
We fly down Leninsky. We are driving to the 1st City Hospital. The patrolmen run from the road as we race past.
The hospital gate is closed behind a barrier. We curse at the guard in the window: “Are you asleep or what? Open up!”
Some bored cops are hanging out by the hospital entrance. Olya loses it.
“What the… did you all just get up?! Come on, help carry!”
The policemen instead go running for the doctors. Suddenly six or seven pour out from the reception area. My hands are shaking from the tension. We carry, and private security guards help.
And then the worst part, the bodies of 3 dead hostages still on the bus…
After a bit of wrangling, the hospital agrees to take them as well.
We drive back, smoking. Olya is tired, and speaks to no one in particular: “The bastards, oh they are such bastards… But, listen, we made it with the rest? We managed with those, ah?”
I am reporting the names of those people who loaded and carried 19 of 22 people. Olya Belyakova is from ambulance substation #13, and Vasily Tegza is from bus park #9.
Indirect proof that the hostages were poisoned with gas is the fact that Yulia Kosterova, who gave me her parents’ phone number, got her own age wrong. When I called her parents, her mother said that Yulia not 14, but 22. Most of the hostages could not hear anything along the way. It is possible that noise grenades may have deafened them.
Appendix 17.
From the statement by O.V. Belyakova (case volume 120, page 130):
We got to Melnikov Street about 0715. On arrival at the DK (Palace of Culture) of Moscow Bearings, Inc., two victims were loaded into our vehicle. MChS (Emergencies Ministry) workers did the loading. Literally a minute later an MChS worker told me to get into a bus and provide help to the victims inside it.
When I entered the bus the doors shut and the MChS worker ordered the driver to go to GKB (City Clinical Hospital) #1. There were no medicines or medical instruments on the bus. While in route, the bus was stopping at the lights, and upon arrival at GKB #1 the security guards at first would not permit us to enter. There were 22 victims on the bus, one of whom was dying at that moment. The victims were arranged chaotically, some sat in the bus seats, while others were on the floor.
I don’t know who was in charge of the evacuation work. I also do not know who carried out the victims.
There was no sorting (of victims) on the square, and this played a negative role. That the victims were sent to the hospital on the buses, without a correlating number of medical personnel, medicines, medical equipment, played a negative role.
What would have helped our work would have been the name of the antidote.