( AP ) - Five years after more than 800 people were taken hostage in a Moscow theater, survivors and relatives of the 130 who died commemorated the attack Friday with a mix of grief and anger over a rescue operation they say was botched.
Nearly all the hostages who died succumbed to the narcotic gas used by Russian special forces to knock out the hostage-takers before security forces stormed the building. Relatives are angry that Russian officials have not been held accountable.
Vladimir Kurbatov, whose 13-year-old daughter Kristina was among the dead, said the moment her body was rolled out in the morgue still plays before his eyes.
"It will never be erased from my heart, my memory," said Kurbatov, 48. "A veil of secrecy protects everyone in power in this country: politicians, bureaucrats, the special services."
The theater in southeastern Moscow was seized on Oct. 23, 2002, by what officials said were 41 attackers during a musical. The attackers demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, where two wars have been fought against separatist rebels.
The captors, some of them women clad in black and wearing explosive belts, freed dozens of children and some foreigners. But they shot five hostages to death near the beginning of the raid, according to authorities and survivors' accounts.
The other victims died after being knocked out by the gas dispersed in the theater in the early hours of Oct. 26, 2002. Russian authorities have never said exactly what substance they used, but after several days of silence the Health Ministry identified it as a compound based on the opiate fentanyl.
The gas proved lethal for many of the stressed, dehydrated and weakened hostages, including children, who had been forced to use the orchestra pit as a common toilet during the 57-hour ordeal.
Those who gathered outside the theater Friday included relatives of some of the 334 people killed two years later in another hostage crisis - the Beslan school seizure. Survivors, relatives and others have blamed the government for many of those deaths as well.
The crowd held a moment of silence for the victims of the theater seizure. The names of the dead were read out to mournful music, and 130 white balloons were released into the sky. Carnations and candles covered the steps leading up to the theater.
Tatyana Yanchuk, who watched the drama from her home five years ago, said her most vivid memory was "the ambulances with wailing sirens rushing along the empty dark street" on the morning the standoff ended.
But there were not enough ambulances, and some of the hostages were loaded onto buses.
A report by the liberal Union of Right Forces party months after the attack said the negligence of officials caused needless deaths. The report faulted authorities for refusing to divulge the composition of the gas to doctors immediately, failing to organize emergency treatment outside the theater, and handling the victims carelessly.
It said many victims were carried by their hands and feet, with their faces up, so they swallowed their tongues. Some were piled into buses without adequate medical personnel to aid them en route to the hospital. A radio reporter who helped unload patients from buses at one hospital testified that about 50 hostages were dead on arrival.
Witnesses and relatives have said that some victims, unconscious but alive, were put in plastic bags and thrown together with the dead.
Officials said all the attackers were killed.
The Kremlin has maintained the operation was handled properly. A month after the raid, Russia's parliament turned down two proposals to set up a commission to investigate it. Some officials who commanded the operation were given state awards.
In 2003, some of the victims' relatives filed suit with the European Court on Human Rights, where they expect hearings to begin later this year.