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MOSCOW – A shocked, wary Russia counted its rising toll of dead and steeled itself for new terrorist blows Saturday in its never-ending Chechen war, after commandos striking behind clouds of disabling gas brought a sudden bloody end to a hostage nightmare. 

The special forces assault on a Moscow theater after a three-day siege left Russians with feelings of both pain and pride: More than 90 hostages were dead, but 750 others were rescued and dozens of their Chechen captors killed. 

Russia “cannot be forced to its knees,” President Vladimir Putin declared afterward on national television. 

But the Russian leader acknowledged the heavy cost to victims’ families: “We could not save everyone. Forgive us.” 

The key targets for the unidentified gas were almost 20 suicide attackers, Chechen women, who sat among the hostages wrapped in explosives, officials said. Had they detonated the charges, the toll of innocents would have been much higher, Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev said. 

Other governments praised the Russian handling of the crisis, but Moscow heard new calls, too, for a political solution to the separatist conflict in Chechnya. 

Besides 50 Chechen assailants reported killed at the theater — some with an apparent execution-style bullet to the head — officials said three other gunmen were captured, and authorities searched this nervous city for accomplices and gunmen who may have escaped. 

The precision terror operation that began Wednesday night in the Russians’ own capital had defied the Kremlin’s repeated contention that the nationalist rebels in predominantly Muslim Chechnya were on the verge of final defeat. 

A Federal Security Service official said the well-armed theater raiders had suspected foreign links and contacts with unspecified embassies in Moscow, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, raising the prospect of insurgents backed by international terrorists plotting other violence in Russia. 

“We can’t have any euphoria,” Vladimir Lukin, the deputy Parliament speaker, said after the raid. “I don’t think we have broken their will.” 

Most surviving hostages, staggering or unconscious from the gas, were being kept from family members who gathered in freezing rain outside a hospital, and their conditions were not reported. 

But the death toll rose as the day stretched on. 

Police officials said hours after the raid that 67 hostages were killed, but the Health Ministry later said the number had risen above 90. 

How they died was not immediately clarified. 

Vasilyev, the deputy interior minister, said none of the 67 initial victims died from gas poisoning. He said nine died because of heart problems, shock or lack of medicine. At the same time, doctors at City Hospital No. 13, where more than 320 freed hostages were taken, said none of those hospitalized had gunshot wounds, Moscow’s TVS television reported. 

The end came 58 hours after the gunmen stormed into the crowded theater during a performance of the popular musical “Nord-Ost,” vowing to die for Chechnya’s independence and threatening to kill their captives unless Moscow withdrew its troops from the war-ravaged region. 

The special forces’ assault began in icy rain when the gunmen began executing hostages before dawn Saturday, Vasilyev said. 

“About 5:15 a.m. there was shooting,” he told reporters at the scene, three miles southeast of the Kremlin. “There was a real threat. Therefore the operation was undertaken.” 

Olga Chernyak, an Interfax news agency reporter caught in the hostage audience, said the gunmen killed a woman and a man “before our eyes.” 

“They shot the man in the eye; there was a lot of blood,” Interfax quoted her as saying from her hospital bed. She said she lost consciousness soon after, apparently because of the gas. 

The incapacitating agent apparently seeped into the theater through the ventilation system, TVS said, and then soldiers from the Alpha anti-terrorist squad burst in. Television footage showed them kicking in glass doors and opening fire, the thunder of their assault rifles setting off car alarm shrieks in the theater parking lot. 

Soon the hostages were brought out, some in the arms of soldiers, most loaded unconscious onto city buses. 

Government film of the aftermath showed dead female hostage-takers sitting in red plush theater seats, in black robes and veils, heads thrown back or bent over, indicating they may have been shot while unconscious. Precisely placed bullet holes could be seen in their heads. One had a gas mask on her face.