Russian Forces Enter Theatre, End Hostage Situation

[Saint Marcus]

or soccer hooligans

[Lincoln]

[Pekka]

It's GREAT! Two masks didn't work and the other one was mine. It's lovely. Refreshing. At least the military ones .

[Combat Ingrid]

Anyone tried the vomit gas?

[GePap]

Well, damn it, i got to experience the stuff on my brthday, as a kid! Why did they have to ask for a general strike on my birthday!

[uh Clem]

Other than that, how was the play?

[axi]

Well, it seems that the death toll is on the rise. What they used was very deadly and they knew it would be so. They deliberately killed more than 100 of their own people, just to show their decisiveness and their zero-tolerance towards the Chechen rebels. Even Ariel Sharon whould not have commited such a hideous act.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by GePap
Currently the NY times has an 'expert' saying that it could be BZ gas, which is not a nerve agent, but is also in a sort of 'grey zone' as far as legality goes. it might be a banned Chemical substance, it might not. it most certainly is not tear gas (raise your hands if you know what tear gas is like from personal experience! ).

This is probably the reason the Russians siply won't say what it was.... because they might have broken the law. as for whether it was justified: I am unsure. We can speculate all we want , but we will never know what the possible outcome mihgt have been otherwise. I do know that as the dead toll grows (and it will), Putin might face slightly more critism.

Ah! I've heard of BZ gas. Originally touted as a knock out gas it was abandoned because at concentrations high enough to effectively knock people out it tended to have a high fatality rate (among experimental animals). No one uses it. Almost no one uses it.

[Capt Dizle]

Originally posted by axi
Well, it seems that the death toll is on the rise. What they used was very deadly and they knew it would be so. They deliberately killed more than 100 of their own people, just to show their decisiveness and their zero-tolerance towards the Chechen rebels. Even Ariel Sharon whould not have commited such a hideous act.

Oh, you are an idiot. How else were they going to deal with the threat of explosives?

[Saint Marcus]

end justifies all means?

[JCG]

Sad as it sounds, they had to use gas, no way around it...Whether it was the right kind of gas or not is open to debate...

[Gangerolf]

next time the terrorists will bring gasmasks

[Sonic]

As I noted in previous post, they still weren't killing people on regular basis. That means probably everything would have been peacefully settled with much less victims. In all other cases before Chechen terrorists also said they are going to die, but later, when food lack came into case, etc. They all agreed to surrend on much less demands. Probably these terrorists would have also surrendered only for letting them free and some amount iof money later, when they would have seen that it is not possible to get troops removed from Chechnya.

[axi]

Oh, you are an idiot. How else were they going to deal with the threat of explosives?

1. Use another kind of gas, which would not be deadly to so many people.

2. Rush in more paramedics than soldiers to quickly administer oxygen and antidotes.

3. Negotiate some more.

4. Actually withdraw from Chechnya.

I don't really care about what they could have done. Putin and his cronies are responsible for this ****, as well as for the tens of thousands dead in the Chechen war itself.

[Dr Strangelove]

The terrrorists had explosives strapped to their bodies, so we can assume that they were willing to take as many hostages with them as they could. If they distributed themselves among the hostages then triggered the bombs they would have killed more than 3 hostages for each terrorist.

If some macedonians took control of a theater in Athens and demanded part of northern Greece would the Greek government cave in and let them have it?