ZNAMENSKOYE, Russia -- It was 6 a.m. when Russian soldiers hoisted themselves over the wall, crashed through the window and broke down the front door. Their quarries were still asleep.

Shouting, shoving and kicking, the soldiers pushed 67-year-old Khavazh Semiyev and his wife into a truck outside, then went back for the others -- his two sons and two nephews, his son's wife, his 52-year-old sister. Then -- and Semiyev couldn't believe his old eyes -- they went back for his grandchildren: Mansur, 11 years old; Malkhazni, 9; and Mamed, 7.

The family was driven in their nightclothes and socks through the empty streets of Chechnya to the Russian army's command center at Khankala. There, the men were forced to their knees, their heads to the ground. Sacks were pulled over their heads, and their hands were tied behind their backs. For the next 24 hours, anyone who moved from that position got kicked.

One day into the seizure of more than 1,000 hostages by suspected Chechen separatists in the town of Beslan, Russia now had its own hostages. An estimated 40 family members of senior Chechen rebel leaders were assembled at Khankala from Thursday, a day after the hostage seizure in Beslan, until Saturday, the day after it ended.

Semiyev's daughter, Kusama, is the wife of Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov. Around him were assembled the extended families of Maskhadov, the former Chechen president, and of Chechen warlords Shamil Basayev and Doku Umarov.

Maskhadov's brother was in the tent where the men were kept, and in a nearby building with the women and children, his elderly sister. A 5-month-old baby proved to be a distant relative of one of the rebel leaders.

"We figured they wanted to exchange us for the hostages in Beslan," Semiyev said in an interview at his home in this small town in northern Chechnya.

"They were trying to make the people of Chechnya feel as bad as the people in Beslan," said Liza Akhmadkhanova, a neighbor of Maskhadov's brother, Lyoma. "They just hate Chechens. Whenever they have a chance to get back at us, they do."

Officially, the Russian government says it was to protect the families' lives. Russia's operations headquarters in the Northern Caucasus said Russian forces obtained intelligence that rebel leaders planned to kill several of their own relatives and accuse Russian law-enforcement of murdering them.

The headquarters staff also said there was evidence that "spontaneous groups" were forming in Chechnya to "vent their anger" at rebel leaders' relatives, presumably over the Beslan siege, in which 335 hostages died and 700 were injured.

"There was a colonel who spoke very eloquently, and everybody was afraid of him. He said we should thank fate and God for them having taken us away on time," Semiyev said. "Because Maskhadov and Basayev supposedly issued an order to have us taken into the building [at Beslan] and executed with the hostages."

Aslanbek Semiyev, Khavazh's nephew, who was a detainee, laughed at that notion."If this was what he thought, he must be a total imbecile."

Maskhadov's spokesman in London, Akhmad Zakayev, said Russian authorities were trying to inspire terror in the terrorists -- although Maskhadov has vigorously denied involvement and condemned the hostage-taking.