NO EXECUTIONS, ONLY THREATS. “

The terrorists,” correspondent Ol’ga Allenova hypothesized in the October 28 issue of Kommersant Vlast, “did not intend to die. Otherwise there would have been absolutely no reason for them to wear masks. They were waiting for something to happen.” Three correspondents wrote in the October 29 issue of Kommersant: “Those who seized [the hall] were not suicide fighters–their goal was negotiations and not a mass murder of the people they had taken.” “I want to say,” Georgy Vasil’ev, one of the authors of the musical being shown in the theater who also became a leader and spokesman for the hostages, stressed to Komsomol’skaya Pravda (October 29), “that no executions [of hostages] took place: There were only threats.”