Hostage-takers at Moscow theater agree to release foreign captives

? Chechen rebels holding hundreds of hostages at a Moscow theater have agreed to release 75 foreign captives, a security official said early today.

The rebels have threatened to kill their remaining hostages unless the Russian army pulls out of Chechnya. They earlier had killed one female hostage.

Embassies were being requested to send representatives to the scene to meet their freed citizens, Federal Security Service spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko said. The foreign hostages include three Americans, as well as Britons, Dutch, Australians, Austrians and Germans.

More than 500 Chechen and Russian hostages were not to be freed.

The releases were to begin at 9 a.m. local time (midnight Thursday in Lawrence), Interfax news agency reported.

The drama began Wednesday when as many as 50 attackers, some of them women who claimed to be widows of ethnic Chechen insurgents, stormed the theater just before the second act of a popular musical.

The hostage killed by a gunshot to the chest, a woman about 20 years old, was the only known fatality of the crisis as it moved into its second night.

Two women jumped from a window under Chechen fire and escaped.

Early today, three male captors appeared on Russia’s NTV network wearing camouflage and carrying assault rifles. The one unmasked man was identified by NTV as the ringleader, Movsar Barayev, nephew of rebel warlord Arbi Barayev who reportedly died last year.

The network, whose crew was allowed to accompany a doctor inside the theater, also showed two female hostage-takers wearing head-to-toe robes that revealed only their eyes. Arabic script was printed on their hoods, they cradled pistols on their chests and wore what appeared to be explosives taped to their waists and wired to a small button they carried in their hands. The captors made no comments in the footage shown, which later included a brief shot of a group of six women hostages guarded by one of the female attackers.

Relatives and friends stood in freezing weather Thursday outside the theater in a rundown southeast Moscow neighborhood three miles from the Kremlin, as special forces troops moved in formation around the building and armored vehicles stood ready. Snipers were on rooftops.

President Vladimir Putin declared that the audacious raid was planned by terrorists based outside Russia, and the Qatar-based satellite TV channel Al-Jazeera broadcast statements by some of the hostage-takers.

“I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living,” a black-clad male said in the broadcast. “Each one of us is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of God and the independence of Chechnya.”

“Even if we are killed, thousands of brothers and sisters will come after us, ready to sacrifice themselves,” a female covered in a black robe except for her eyes said on the tape, which Al-Jazeera said was believed to have been recorded Wednesday the day the extraordinary raid brought the war in Chechnya some 865 miles north to the Russian capital.