A court on Friday convicted a Chechen man of assisting a hostage-taking raid on a Moscow theater, and a prosecutor claimed rebels may also have planned to seize the Russian parliament. The Moscow City Court found Zairbek Talkhigov guilty of informing gunmen about the location of special forces around the theater during the standoff in October. He was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in a maximum-security prison. The gunmen took about 800 people hostage during a performance of a musical. Talkhigov had pleaded not guilty, saying he had gotten the phone number of the hostage-takers’ leader, Movsar Barayev, from a Russian lawmaker and wanted to help free the hostages. He said he gave the gunmen some information about the troops’ movement to win their trust, the Interfax news agency reported. Talkhigov’s mother, Tamara, said she would appeal the verdict before Russia’s Supreme Court. Special forces stormed the theater, killing all 41 hostage-takers. In the end, 129 hostages died, most of them from a narcotic gas used to incapacitate the militants. Full Story
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