A TV image from Russian television network NTV shows Chechen gunmen, including leader Movsar Barayev (R), sitting inside a Moscow theatre. A Chechen suicide squad holding 700 people hostage at the theatre rigged with explosives, agreed to free all foreigners on Friday, security officials said. PHOTO – REUTERS

MOSCOW– Chechen separatist guerrillas were holding up to 700 theatregoers hostage in Moscow on

Thursday, threatening to shoot their captives or blow up the building unless Russia pulled its troops out of their homeland. The group of about 40, including masked women with explosives strapped to their bodies, burst in on Wednesday night firing into the air and shouting „Stop the war in Chechnya“.

Explosives had been laid in passageways and on seats and even attached to hostages themselves. Officials said some 60 foreigners were among the captives. President Vladimir Putin, who rose to power on pledges three years ago to clamp down on the decade-old rebellion on Russia‘s southern fringe and boost public security, held a crisis meeting with security chiefs and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

Contacts with the hostage-takers appeared erratic at best. They called on Putin to stop the war and pull his troops out of Chechnya if he wanted to save the hostages‘ lives. Police said there were up to 700 people still in the theatre, a modern building about four km southeast of the Kremlin.

The attack presented Putin with his sternest test since becoming president more than two years ago. He has taken an uncompromising stand on the conflict in largely-Muslim Chechnya on Russia‘s southern fringes, where the Kremlin has twice launched military pushes to crush separatists. Western accusations of human rights abuses against civilians in the devastated province have died down since Putin threw Moscow‘s backing behind the U.S.-led global war on terrorism following last year‘s September 11 attacks in the United States. Reuters