Terror In Moscow (C4)

When masked gunmen stormed on to the stage during the performance of a musical in a Moscow theatre, the audience thought they were watching great acting. The behaviour of the weapons-carrying intruders and the terror on the faces of the actors being ordered off the stage was very convincing.

What the audience learnt very quickly, to their own horror, was that the scenario being played out before their eyes wasn't play-acting, but reality. The theatre had been taken over by a Chechen suicide squad, with performers and audience cast in the all-too-real roles of terrified hostages.

If this had happened in Hollywood, they'd probably have turned last year's Russian siege into a TV movie of the week. But Terror In Moscow was all too real, from the moment the theatre's own video system captured the terrorists' first appearance, through the "home movies" of hostages taken by a video camera-toting gunmen, to the gruesome spectacle of bloody corpses as the siege came to an end.

Besides the video footage, the documentary had interviews with hostages, who relived the trauma that led to some losing husbands and children - not through the direct actions of the terrorists, but the authorities' attempts to deal with the situation.

The dreadful outcome to the story was that the Russian plan to end the siege saw all the suicide squad - 22 men and 19 women with explosives strapped to them - killed without the loss of the life of one Russian soldier. Before anyone says, "well done", take a look at what happened to the hostages. They were not so fortunate as 129 of them died in the bungled aftermath.

The Russians played for time. When the terrorists threatened to start executing hostages if their demands weren't met, a government bigwig phoned to say he was on his way to negotiate face-to-face. He never arrived. It was a stalling tactic until the rescue plan was ready.

The Russians knocked everyone out, terrorists and hostages alike, by pumping a "grey mist" - a powerful anaesthetic blended into an aerosol spray - into the auditorium. Soldiers stormed in and killed the terrorists while they were sleeping.

But there were not enough stretchers to carry out the unconscious hostages. They were bundled from the building and left in heaps, many face-down, outside. Dozens choked on their own vomit or swallowed their tongues. There was plenty of antidote for the anaesthetic available but not enough medics to administer the injections.

One woman was released by terrorists before the end of the siege after she was accidentally shot. She pleaded with gunmen to let her husband and daugher leave with her. They refused. She broke down as she recalled that, convinced she'd never see her husband again, she'd said goodbye to him, but had failed to say a final farewell to her daughter.

She now recognised the feelings of the Chechen widows in the suicide squad. If she'd been in their position, she'd have done the same - strapped on explosives and been willing to give her life in memory of her lost loved ones.