Hi there, I'm Namu Lanter Combo and I'm the host of another BBC World Service

podcast called Dear Daughter. Maybe you've listened to our first season or maybe

you heard about us a few months ago when we won best podcast of the year at the

British Podcast Awards. I am so excited to tell you we are coming back for our

second season but I need your help. I'll be back to tell you more after this

episode.

Thank you for downloading the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

It's 20 years since heavily armed Chechen rebels took a theatre full of people

hostage in Moscow. They threatened to kill them all if the Russian government

didn't call off the war in Chechnya. After a three-day siege that ended on

the 26th of October, Russian security services stormed the theatre. All the

Chechens and many of their hostages died. In this program first broadcast in

2012, Deena Newman talks to one survivor from the audience. It's the 23rd of

October 2002 and visiting Professor Alex Bobik, a 56-year-old Australian, is on a

night out with his Russian colleagues at the Palace of Culture Theatre in

Central Moscow. The second half of the hit musical Nordost is starting.

You heard this rumble of boots coming down from the back and then

shots fired into the air and I turned to my colleague, Russian colleague and I

said this isn't part of the act. I knew there was something wrong, terribly wrong.

Several hundred people are being held hostage in a Moscow theatre tonight,

apparently by Chechen militants who are threatening to blow up the theatre

unless Russia ends its military campaign in Chechnya. The hostage takers were

...