An unidentified woman cries Monday outside the Moscow theatre where Russian special forces ended a terrorist takeover on the weekend. Photo: Efrem Lukatsky/AP

Moscow — Relief has turned to bewilderment and anger as Russians count the dead among hostages in the storming of a Moscow theatre and the use of a secret incapacitating gas to thwart terrorists who had threatened to kill hundreds of captives.

"There are big questions about the priorities of our authorities in this situation," said Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Centre for Strategic Studies in Moscow.

Mr. Piontkovsky and other critics have suggested that saving ordinary citizens' lives was not at the top of the list of official concerns in the weekend operation.

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Despite efforts by President Vladimir Putin to reform the bureaucracy, critics say the government's reputation for callousness, secrecy and fibbing to the public has resurfaced during the hostage crisis.

After some 50 Chechen terorrists seized about 800 hostages in a central Moscow theatre last Wednesday, Mr. Putin declared that saving hostages' lives was his chief concern — something no Russian leader had done before.

When Russian special forces stormed the building on Saturday morning, the mission seemed to go like clockwork. Using a special "sleeping gas" to incapacitate people inside, they charged into the theatre, shot the armed Chechens dead and freed the hostages.

Later in the day, a tearful official spokesman, Vladimir Vasilyev, announced that the terrorists had managed to kill 67 of the hostages during the 40-minute melee.

Two days after the tragedy, however, Russian medical authorities said that only two hostages were killed by terrorists and that 117 hostages died from the mysterious knockout gas. Most of the surviving hostages were hospitalized, with more than 100 in intensive care, including 45 in "grave condition" on Monday.

Foreign leaders — and even some surviving hostages — said Moscow had little choice but to storm the building, because the terrorists had threatened to kill hostages and blow up the building.

But critics argue that more could have been done to save hostages from the gas, or to give them medical help earlier.

"In this case, the special forces did their job, which was to kill terrorists, but they obviously didn't communicate with the people whose task was to save lives," said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent security expert. "The special forces went into the theatre without respirators. This means there was an antidote. Why didn't they give it to the people?"

A cavalcade of ambulances arrived at the theatre after the storming, but rescuers took more than two hours to ferry all the victims to hospitals.

"In the case of gas poisoning like this, time is of the essence," said a Russian doctor treating hostages, who asked not to be identified. "Many died during the delay, many more suffered irreversible damage. They might have been saved if immediate treatment were implemented."

Russia's Ministry of Emergency Services, which has won international praise for its ability to deploy sophisticated field hospitals to remote disaster areas, was not at the scene of Saturday's tragedy in downtown Moscow.

Russian authorities, citing secrecy rules, refused to identify the gas used. Moscow's chief doctor, Andrei Seltsovsky, in charge of treating the hostages, said Monday that he still does not know the name of the gas.

"People are still dying from the effects of this gas, and yet our authorities stick to their old Cold War script of secrecy," Dr. Piontkovsky said. "Doctors are denied the information they need to save lives."

Rumours and conjectures abound about the gas.

Russian experts suggested the main ingredient could be a powerful tranquilizer like Valium. Or it might be a powerful agent developed by the former Soviet KGB that was never used before, a former defence official writes in the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.

"Most likely the agent they chose was the gas known as KOLOKOL-1, the most promising of all psycho-chemical agents developed by the Soviet special services," Viktor Baranets suggests in the article.

The gas "can render a healthy person completely unconscious in one to three seconds. ... For people with weak cardiovascular systems or high vomit reflex, a lethal outcome is possible."

In Washington, Pentagon officials said the gas was an opiate — a chemical related to morphine. This group of substances can kill pain and dull the senses but may also bring on coma and death by shutting down breathing and circulation.

"There is a well-known Russian habit of overdoing things," said Lev Fyodorov, a former Soviet chemical weapons scientist who now heads the independent Council for Chemical Security in Moscow.

"The doses they injected into the theatre were far too great. ... They did not take into account that many people inside the theatre were from risk groups, such as pregnant women, people with heart, kidney or liver problems, elderly people and so on."

Mr. Putin has publicly lamented the loss of life and asked for forgiveness that hostages died in the crisis, but relatives of some victims had not received official information about their loved ones by Monday evening.

"It seems that in Russia, victory is always three-quarters disaster," said Alexander Konovalov, an expert with the Institute of Canada-USA Studies in Moscow.