The "cold-blooded murder" bit referred to the sustained refusal by the Russian authorities to let people treating the surviving hostages have the information they needed to treat them. It seems pretty certain that this has resulted in many of them dying horrible deaths, when they could have been saved.

I don't think describing this as "cold-blooded murder" is any kind of exaggeration. Maybe, as I said, there wasn't an alternative to going in the way they did with the gas, but that is a very different matter.

Just imagine this had happened in London and it was the British government refusing to let doctors in the London hospitals have information about what they were dealing with.

If there were a situation where a bunch of terrorists carried out a gas attack, and refused to let the medical teams have any information about the gas used, that would quite rightly be seen as an additional act of terror.

Maybe the media here have got it all wrong, and the Russian authorities have been cooperating fully, and the doctors who have bitterly complained have been lying for some reason. In that case obviously I'd withdraw that comment. But it doesn't seem too likely.