I was confronted by a scene from hell as I entered the theatre

Julius Strauss was so close to the action that a bullet fizzed past his ear. He recounts the horrific scenes that awaited him.

27 October 2002

THE RAID started at around 5.30am - a sustained burst of gunfire and several explosions that interrupted the relentless tapping of the rain on car roofs and window panes that had marked the night. Squads of special forces, weighed down by bullet-proof vests, ran towards the theatre's glass doors.

As they reached the entrance, one threw in a thunderflash. "Spetsnaz," (Special Forces) hissed a Russian photographer, one of two colleagues sharing my ring-side seat in a fourth-floor flat opposite.

There were a few seconds' silence, then a huge explosion that shook the window panes. Car alarms erupted in the parking place.

Somewhere to my left, a heavy machine-gun opened up for a few seconds. Silence. Then six single shots.

Hiding under the kitchen window, I peered out again. My Russian host, a chain-smoking man with dishevelled hair, appeared briefly at the door and then retreated, looking worried.

Suddenly, to the left of the theatre, a group of terrified women appeared. The first hostages I had seen escape, they scurried out of the shadows and fled across the street to safety.

Inside the theatre, the Russian special forces were beginning to fan out. They held their guns tight to their shoulders, stooping slightly. They were silhouetted by the powerful interior lights, showing off the profile of their guns and sharp, precise movements.

As they moved forward they smashed huge panes of glass to gain easier access. About a dozen of them disappeared into an unseen room. Fresh shooting erupted. A minute later two reappeared, carrying a wounded colleague on their shoulders to a military ambulance.

Two minutes passed. Another injured Spetsnaz man was brought out. A minute later a policeman emerged with the lifeless body of a woman over his shoulder. She had flowing blonde hair and a red anorak.

As I was peering for a closer look, a bullet sounded. It passed so close to me that the air around it fizzed like a sparkler. I ducked, clasping instinctively a broken radiator to steady myself. "Sniper," the Russian photographer snapped.

When I looked out again the theatre's awning, emblazoned with the words Nord-Ost in huge Cyrillic lettering and decorated with seagulls, had been rent apart in two places and was flapping in the wind.

Special engineers from the Russian Ministry of Emergency began to arrive. They carried one body after another from the theatre, laying them on the concrete pavement.

The lifeless forms appeared to be dead. First there were six, then 10 then many more. A woman was hauled to an ambulance 50 yards away by four rescue workers. They laid her down on the tarmac and then returned for more victims. She didn't move.

A few minutes later nine ambulances rolled into the car park. They were loaded with prone, lifeless bodies.

Firemen in yellow hats rushed in. They were as grimy as rubbishmen, their orange uniforms stained and dirtied. A blue police light flashed. A white Jeep screeched its tyres. Above, the first light of dawn was in the sky.

As the shooting died down, I was reluctant to leave my vantage point. With a colleague I had spent much of the day and night probing the police cordon around the theatre.

"Nazad, nazad," the Russians soldiers kept saying. "Back, back." Finally, barely minutes before the attack begun, we had sneaked around a cordon and through a small, waterlogged park.

On the fourth floor of a block of flats opposite we found a family willing to take us in for a few hours. The fifth floor, with the best view, had been taken over by Russian snipers.

Now, however, it was time to leave. As more and more bodies were brought out of the main entrance I was keen to get closer.

Down the stairs, out of the building, I walked swiftly, shoulders stooped. A soldier raised a challenge but we kept walking, ignoring the orders to stop. He didn't follow.

In front of the theatre I saw firemen, policemen, special forces soldiers and state security officials in plain clothes.

Some of the special forces were already clambering aboard a bus to be taken back to base, their mission over.

In one corner was a group of men wearing black uniforms, bullet-proof jackets and white armbands. They stood around smoking listlessly or gazing into space. One stared at the ground.

In the middle of the car park was a minivan that the terrorists had used as transport, a white Chevrolet with smoked-glass windows. In the early hours of the siege, the van's engine had been left running, puffing out thick, bluish fumes into the frigid Moscow air.

But the tank had run dry and now it was cold, its metallic paint dripping wet from the relentless drizzle. Inside was an empty plastic water bottle, a baseball boot and a cream cloth jacket, perhaps used to conceal the fatigues that the terrorists were wearing as they sped across Moscow last Wednesday night.

As I came to the entrance of the theatre, I was confronted with a scene from hell. On a wide stone step lay dozens of bodies of men and women of all ages, limbs entangled. A few had wide open eyes, staring. One man had his shirt ripped off and his head thrown back, his bare chest, ribcage showing, thrust upwards towards the sky.

Another, in his middle years, had healthy dark grey hair and eyebrows, but his features were turning waxy in a mask of death.

The hostages had miraculously survived the Chechens. But here they lay, some dead, some dying, all unconscious, as if stricken by a mysterious killer disease.

None of the bodies I saw, and I estimated there to be well over 70, appeared to have bullet or shrapnel wounds. Nor was there any blood.

As I stared in horror, dozens more were brought out. Some were lain on the ground, others carried off to ambulances.

A girl, carried out by a policeman, was wearing only a black bra and dark trousers, her snow-white skin gleaming in the early morning light. A man had been stripped of his trousers and underwear. "We should have brought buses to carry them away in, not ambulances," one policeman said, turning to his colleague.

A special forces soldier moved among the injured and dying. A few times he stopped and raised someone's head, smacking it sharply on both sides in a crude attempt at resuscitation.

Others soldiers ripped open victims' shirts and tried pumping their hearts, but there seemed to be little response. "Come on, come on," one soldier said as he massaged a man's heart in vain. Two of the prone men lay twitching spasmodically.

A bull-necked man with a shaved head, who was wearing a polo neck and leather jacket and was almost certainly an FSB (formerly the KGB) officer, stood helplessly looking at the limp bodies.