Four suspects have appeared in court in Moscow charged over the terrorist attack on the Crocus City concert hall on Friday that left 137 people dead.
The men were officially identified as citizens of Tajikistan, the Tass state news agency said, and were remanded in custody for two months at Sunday’s hearing.
The court released a video showing police officers bringing one of the suspects into the courtroom in handcuffs, as well as photographs of the same man sitting in a glass cage for defendants. One of the suspects was led blindfolded into the courtroom. When his blindfold was removed, a black eye was visible. Another suspect was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair.
The men, identified as Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, Dalerdzhon Barotovich Mirzoyev, Shamsidin Fariduni and Muhammadsobir Fayzov, face charges of a “terror attack committed by a group of individuals resulting in a person’s death”, according to the Tass news agency. All four pleaded guilty.
Earlier on Sunday, Islamic State had released new footage of the attack, corroborating the terror group’s claim to have masterminded the slaughter even as Russia has sought to place the blame on Ukraine, which Kyiv denies.
The incident near Moscow is the deadliest IS-claimed assault on European soil and the deadliest attack by any group in Russia since the 2004 Beslan siege.
The footage, published by IS’s news agency Amaq, showed gunmen filming themselves as they hunted victims in the lobby of the hall and fired from point-blank range, killing scores of people. At one point, one gunmen tells another to “kill them and have no mercy”.
Vladimir Putin said 11 people had been detained, including the four gunmen. Russia’s investigative committee released a video earlier yesterday showing the suspects being led, blindfolded, into its headquarters.
Russia observed a nationwide day of mourning on Sunday for the worst terror attack on the country’s soil in two decades, as the official number of wounded rose to 154. Russian authorities have said they expect the death toll to rise with at least one dozen victims still in critical condition.
Thousands of people brought flowers and other tributes to the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, outside Moscow, as local emergency workers say they are still continuing to search for anyone who may be left wounded or dead inside the severely damaged entertainment complex.
Putin has not yet visited the site of the shooting. The Kremlin published footage showing the president lighting a candle at a church at his residence outside Moscow on Sunday evening to honour those who died.
Foreign embassies in Moscow have also voiced their solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attack. Flags were lowered to half-mast at the embassies of the US, the UK and the Netherlands amid high tensions over the war in Ukraine.
The Russian leader also claimed, without evidence, that Ukraine had “prepared a window” for the terrorists to cross the border from Russia into Ukraine. Kyiv has vociferously denied any links to the attack and has indicated that it believes Moscow is preparing a pretext to escalate the conflict.
The US has said it received intelligence that the terror group acted alone. “Isis bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever,” the national security council spokesperson, Adrienne Watson, said in a statement.
Russian officials and state media have largely ignored IS’s claims to be behind the attacks. Meduza, an independent Russian-language website, has reported that Russian state-funded and pro-government media had been instructed by the Putin administration to emphasise possible “traces” of Ukrainian involvement in the attack, according to two state media employees.
Olga Skabeyeva, a prominent state television host, claimed on Telegram that Ukrainian military intelligence had recruited assailants “who would look like Isis. But this is no Isis”.
Putin did not name the Islamist terror group during his public statements on the attack, while directly accusing the “Ukrainian side” of involvement. IS also released a photograph of the purported gunmen before the attack. Researchers have noted that their clothing matches that worn by some of the attackers.
On Sunday, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, disregarded the US intelligence reports that IS was behind the attacks. “I wish they could have solved the assassination of their own President Kennedy so quickly,” she wrote on Telegram. “But no, for more than 60 years they have not been able to find out who killed him after all. Or maybe that was Isis too?”
“Until the investigation into the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall is completed, any phrase from Washington exonerating Kyiv should be considered as evidence,” she added. “After all, the financing of terrorist activities of the Kyiv organised criminal group by the American liberal democrats and participation in the corrupt schemes of the Biden family have been going on for many years.”
Fresh details have emerged of how the gunmen stormed the concert hall and began firing into crowds of people, then set fire to the building and fled the scene, leading to a fevered manhunt for the terrorists. The Russian investigative committee said those killed in the concert hall died of gunshot wounds and “poisoning” related to the fire.
The gunmen appear to have planned the attack carefully, setting fires by an emergency stairwell in order to herd people toward a killing zone in the middle of the lobby.
The men were caught in the southern Bryansk region, where authorities said they disabled their vehicle, and then apprehended several of the suspects as they fled into a nearby forest. New videos have been published showing Russian security forces interrogating the men, at least one of whom spoke Tajik during an interrogation. Tajikistan’s foreign ministry initially denied that the suspects were citizens of the country.
In a phone call on Sunday, Putin and the Tajikistan leader, Emomali Rahmon, “noted that security services and relevant agencies of Russia and Tajikistan are working closely in countering terrorism, and this work will be intensified”.
Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) has previously been reported to have recruited radicalised nationals from central Asia, including Tajikistan.
Some of the videos of the interrogations suggest that the men were tortured by Russian security services. One of the clips, circulated by Russian bloggers, appears to show members of the security forces cutting off the ear of a man who is later interrogated over the attack and then stuffing it into his mouth. Another appears to show security forces beating a suspect with their rifle butts and kicking him as he lies in the snow.
Russian independent media noted that the officer who apparently cut off the ear of the suspect was wearing patches that indicated his support for neo-Nazi groups and appeared to have contact with the far-right Rusich paramilitary group, which is active in Ukraine. The patches included a black sun and a symbol resembling the Totenkopf – or death’s head – worn by several Nazi divisions.
Experts have described Friday’s attack as a failure of the country’s sprawling security services, which have been distracted by the war in Ukraine and a relentless crackdown on political opposition at home.
“The FSB obviously had their priorities wrong. They had their main resources on Ukraine and on the domestic opposition,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services.
“What is striking is the catastrophic incompetence of our security services,” Ivan Zhdanov, the former head of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation, told AFP.
Andrei Soldatov, a leading Russian researcher, wrote that the FSB had become “very efficient and innovative at repression … But these are not the qualities that help to prevent attacks happening, and time and again the FSB has failed as an intelligence collection agency because other things are needed: information-sharing capabilities between agencies, both domestic and foreign, and trust between those agencies and within those agencies.”
Meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt said that the UK should “absolutely” be concerned about the threat that IS poses to the country after the terror attack in Moscow.
“We are very lucky in this country that we have incredibly impressive intelligence agencies, who have been successful in stopping, in foiling a lot of terrorist threats over recent years,” the British chancellor told Sky News.
“But we have to remain vigilant. And if it is Islamic State, they are utterly indiscriminate in what they do. They’re prepared to murder in the most horrific way.”
