MOSCOW (AFP) -- A year after a Moscow theater hostage-taking that left 170 people dead, relatives of the victims say the Russian government did not do enough to save lives during the siege.

"We want an independent inquiry, so that the guilty are punished," said Yelena Karpova, who lost her only son in the raid.

On October 23, 2002, Chechen commandoes stormed a Moscow theater during a musical performance, taking some 800 people hostage and demanding that Moscow withdraw troops from war-torn Chechnya.

Russian special forces stormed the theater three days later, after pumping in a debilitating gas that killed most of the 129 hostages in the assault, over and above the 41 hostage-takers.

Critics have said that the deaths could have been prevented if Russian authorities had provided proper medical care for those affected.

The doctors who were on the scene were not told what gas was used in the raid and thus did not know what antidote to administer.

"There were not enough stretchers and the hostages who lost consciousness were transported in any which way," said Yelena Baranovskaya, one of the hostages who lost her husband and only son in the siege.

Rescuers dragged many of the unconscious hostages out of the theater by their feet. As a result many of the people died choking on their own vomit. "They should have above all aired out the theater after the assault," said Zoya Chernetsova, a former nurse whose only son died in the raid. "That would have enabled more lives to be saved."

For several days after the raid the authorities refused to name the gas used. Finally Health Minister Yury Shevchenko said it was a derivative of Fentanyl, a sedative.

But some experts have said that the effects were too harsh for Fentanyl and suspected that the gas used was prohibited by the Geneva conventions on chemical weapons.

The authorities handling of the siege did not draw widespread criticism in Russia, with officials brushing off all protest.

"It is the terrorists who should be blamed for that and not those who fought against them," President Vladimir Putin told U.S. reporters at the end of September. "Those people died not as a result of the gas, because the gas was not harmful," he said. "People had become victims of a number of circumstances -- dehydration, chronic diseases, the very fact that they had to stay in that building."

After the siege, the Moscow mayor's office made ex gratia payments of between 50,000 and 100,000 rubles (between 1,500 and 3,000 dollars/euros) to victims of the hostage-taking.

In January this year, attorney Igor Trunov filed 64 complaints on behalf of families of those killed and those who survived the incident, demanding a total of some 60 million dollars in damages.

Trunov argued that Russian antiterrorist law holds local authorities in the vicinity where terrorist acts occur accountable for those acts.

After having thrown out most of the claims, a Moscow court at the end of September ordered the city government to pay compensation to 10 victims.

The payments varied from 246 rubles (nine dollars, seven euros) to 8,360 rubles per month, or a 2,710 to 75,467-ruble lump-sum payment.