Putin's aide Patrushev blamed the Ministry of Emergency Situations for the death of the Nord-Ost hostages; the department was then headed by Shoigu

Vladimir Putin's assistant and former head of the FSB Nikolai Patrushev accused the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the death of some of the Nord-Ost hostages in 2002 - the department was then headed by Sergei Shoigu. He told his version of events at the theater center on Dubrovka in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Agency drew attention to .

Patrushev claims that the operation itself to free the hostages was carried out successfully, and the FSB units “worked professionally.” The victims, he said, occurred after the assault.

“After the destruction of the terrorists, all hostages should have received the necessary assistance. It was supposed to be provided by rescue services who entered the auditorium after the special forces. But they were confused. As a result, not all victims were injected with the antidote, and some of the hostages received a double dose. This led to losses,” Patrushev said.

During the seizure of the theater center on Dubrovka in October 2002, Patrushev headed the FSB. The former head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Shoigu, subsequently served as Minister of Defense, and is now the Secretary of the Russian Security Council. Patrushev himself held the same post from 2008 to 2024.

On October 23, 2002, terrorists took more than 900 people hostage during the musical “Nord-Ost” at the theater center on Dubrovka. They held the hostages for three days. On the morning of October 26, the building was stormed and 40 terrorists were killed. According to official data, 130 hostages, including 10 children, also died.

During the assault, the special services used gas, the composition of which the authorities did not disclose for a long time. It later became known that the security forces used a mixture of carfentanil and remifentanil.

In 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in a lawsuit against the Russian authorities in favor of 64 victims of the terrorist attack. Russia was ordered to pay compensation totaling about 1.3 million euros, as well as conduct a new investigation into the causes of the deaths of the hostages. It was never started.

According to the case file of Khasan Zakaev, convicted in the Dubrovka terrorist attack, the hostages died due to a combination of “unfavorable factors,” which “excludes a direct cause-and-effect relationship only between the exposure of the victims to a gaseous chemical substance and their death.”

Earlier, the BBC Russian Service published a commentary by the head of the Alpha veterans association, Sergei Goncharov, who participated in the assault. According to him, some hostages were injected with an antidote on the spot by special forces who could not take into account the physical characteristics of all 900 hostages.

The Agency also drew attention to comments about the terrorist attack on Dubrovka in Andrei Kondrashov’s 2018 film “Putin.” In it, Patrushev claimed that after using the gas, “some people came to their senses even without an antidote.” “This confirms that this substance is completely normal. And subsequently - we did not advertise - this substance was used, and there were no casualties,” Patrushev said then. He did not bring charges against the Ministry of Emergency Situations then.

At the same time, Putin said in the same film that the hostages died due to “the inability to act in that situation”: “There were enough doses of the antidote, you just had to give an injection and that’s it, but some were given two or three times, and others not even once.” According to Putin, “in these conditions it is difficult to punish someone” and “difficult to make claims.”