MOSCOW -- A Moscow court on Tuesday ordered city authorities for the first time to pay monthly compensation to the wife of a man who died in the October hostage-taking in a Moscow theater, news agencies reported.

The court ordered the Moscow city government to pay a total of 50,000 dollars to the woman, whose husband died in the siege, on the grounds that he was the family's main breadwinner, reports said.

The woman's complaint was not one of 61 filed against Moscow city authorities seeking around 60 million dollars in damages for suffering endured during the three-day ordeal in the heart of the Russian capital.

She had filed the suit to receive financial compensation, while the others were filed to compensate moral suffering, said Igor Trunov, the lawyer defending the 61 complaints.

Moscow courts have thrown out more than half of those complaints, filed by Trunov under the anti-terrorist law which holds local authorities accountable for "terrorist acts" committed on their territory.

Trunov welcomed the decision, but admitted it had little relation to his embattled suits, AFP reported.

"This is the first such decision, a legal precedent," Trunov told AFP.

"But this is financial compensation for a material demand, it's logical they accepted this because there are very few victims of this type. The majority are asking for compensation for moral damages," he said.

A total of 129 hostages died in the crisis, most of them from a deadly gas pumped into the theater to subdue the hostage-takers before special operations officers carried out a pre-dawn raid.

The 41 Chechen separatist rebels who took the theater hostage also died.

The multimillion-dollar suits, brought by hostages who survived the ordeal and relatives of those who died, are unprecedented in Russia, where hundreds have been killed or injured in rebel attacks in recent years.

A Moscow district court said Monday it would reexamine next week 20 of Trunov's lawsuits that it had earlier thrown out. A total of 36 lawsuits related to the hostage-taking have already been rejected.

The Moscow Mayor's Office, which rejected Trunov's proposal for an out-of-court settlement, argues it has already paid out compensation claims, having made payments of between 50,000 and 100,000 rubles (between 1,500 and 3,000 euros/1,700 and 3,400 dollars) to victims after the hostage-taking.