MOSCOW - About 40 well-armed Chechens held hundreds of hungry and thirsty people hostage in a theater early Thursday and were threatening to shoot the audience and blow up the building if Russian security forces tried to storm the theater.

Russian authorities held their first talks with the hostage takers who several hours before had stormed into the theater in an audacious and extremly well-planned attack, fired their weapons and demanded that Russia end the war in Chechnya.

The hostage takers told Aslanbek Aslakhanov, a deputy from Chechnya to the federal parliament who was serving as a mediator, they wanted Russian troops to withdraw from Chechnya and a cease-fire in the three-year old war, lawmaker Yuli Rybakov told reporters outside the theater.

Rybakov said the hostage takers had automatic weapons, grenades, belts with explosives attached, mines and canisters with gasoline with them. There was little water or food available for the hostages.

The dramatic hostage taking was a blow for President Vladimir Putin, who repeatedly has said Russia has the situation in Chechnya, a mainly Muslim republic in southern Russia, under control. Putin scrapped a trip to Germany and then Portugal on Thursday, his press spokesman, Alexei Gromov, told Interfax. It was unclear what Putin planned to do about attending the weekend APEC summit in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where he was to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush.

The crackle of automatic gunfire rang out sporadically during the hostage-taking in a working class district in the Russian capital. Police and security forces were on high alert, with extra security around electric power plants.

More than 100 women and children had been released, Moscow police spokesman Valery Gribakin said. Two pregnant women and some people who felt unwell also were freed. The freed hostages were distraught, sobbing and shaking as they emerged.

Inside the theater, frantic hostages called their families, television and radio stations on their cell phones. Outside, desperate Muscovites waited in freezing rain in the dark for news of their relatives.

"The terrorists are demanding one thing - the end to the war in Chechnya," Gribakin said.

Gribakin said there were about 600 people inside the theater when it was seized. The Germany Foreign Ministry confirmed there were Germans inside. Russian news reports said three British citizens also were in the theater.

ITAR-Tass reported the armed men were laying mines inside the theater. Other Russian media reports said that the gunmen threatened to shoot spectators if Russian security forces moved in on the building. TV6 television news said the attackers had mines on their bodies and would blow themselves up if the Russians attempted to use force against them.

Police towed cars near the theater away and patients from a nearby hospital were bused to another health facility.

A woman who made her way out of the theater said in an interview on Russia's NTV television that men wearing camouflage went on stage, fired in the air and said: "Don't you understand what's going on? We are Chechens."

According to Russian television and news agency reports, armed men and women, wearing camouflage, arrived in jeeps just as the second act was about to begin. When police and security forces surrounded the theater, the attackers opened fired and threw a grenade. One of the hostages, a doctor, was treating a hostage taker who was wounded.

The Interfax news agency, quoting released hostages, said there were pools of blood in the hall of the theater but that they had not seen any dead people. Other hostages reported that the attackers had beaten people in the audience.

Russian news agencies cited a Chechen rebel website as saying the group was led by Movsar Barayev, the nephew of warlord Arbi Barayev, who was reportedly killed last year. The website said some of the women hostage takers were the widows of Chechen rebels killed fighting the Russians. On the web site, the hostage takers called themselves "smertniki," a word that in Russian refers to fighters who die for a cause.

Russian television and radio stations broadcast the names of freed hostages over the air. A telephone hotline was launched to provide information to worried relatives.

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"We must start a dialogue," Nemtsov said.

Over the past decade Chechens or their sympathizers have been involved in a number of bold, often bloody hostage-taking situations in southern Russian provinces, especially in Dagestan.

Russian forces left Chechnya in 1996 after a disastrous two-year war but returned in 1999 after rebels raided a neighboring region and Russian authorities blamed rebels for a series of apartment bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people.

The theater, a former Soviet-era House of Culture that belonged to a ball-bearing plant, was staging a performance of the musical "Nord-Ost," one of Moscow's most popular productions.

Located in southeastern Moscow in a working class neighborhood, the musical is based on Veniamin Kaverin's novel "Two Captains." The romantic novel recounts the story of two students and their different destinies during the Soviet times.

According to the theater's Web site, more than 350,000 people have seen the production since it opened.