Putin promises to punish terrorists who caused massacres in Moscow

Russia announced the arrest of the four suspects Massacre in a concert hall near Moscowwhile President Vladimir Putin vowed to find and punish the perpetrators of the attack.

The Islamist group Islamic State claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack, but there are signs that Russia is seeking a connection with Ukraine, although Ukrainian authorities flatly denied that Kiev had anything to do with it.

Moscow regional governor Andrei Vorobyov announced this within 24 hours They had recovered 133 bodies from the rubble and that doctors “fought for the lives of 107 people.” State television editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan had previously put the death toll at 143, without citing a source.

In a televised address, Putin said 11 people had been arrested, including the four gunmen. “They tried to hide and made their way towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary information, a window was prepared for them to cross the state border from the Ukrainian side,” he said.

This was announced by the Russian secret service FSB The attackers had contacts in Ukraine and They were captured near the border. According to him, they will be transferred to Moscow.

Neither Putin nor the FSB publicly provided evidence of their ties with Ukraine, a country with which Russia has been at war for 25 months. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said it was typical of Putin and “other tyrants” to shift blame.

Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov told Reuters:

Of course, Ukraine is not involved in this terrorist attack. “Ukraine defends its sovereignty from Russian invaders, liberates its own territory and fights against the occupiers’ army and military targets, not against civilians.”

The Islamic State has strong motivation to attack Russiawhich intervened against them in the Syrian civil war in 2015, and security analysts said their claim seemed plausible because it fit the pattern of previous attacks.

Putin’s speech

Putin called the enemy “International terrorism” and he showed himself ready to cooperate with any state that wanted to defeat him.

All authors, organizers and commissioners of this crime will be punished fairly and inevitably. “Whoever they are, whoever leads them,” Putin said. “We will identify and punish everyone who is behind the terrorists who prepared this atrocity, this coup against Russia, against our people.”

A senior Russian lawmaker, Andrei Kartapolov, said that if Ukraine was involved, Russia had to give a “dignified” response“clear and concrete” on the battlefield.

Western countries, including the United States, whose relations with Moscow have been strained since the invasion of Ukraine, condemned the attack and expressed solidarity with the affected Russian people. Arab powers and many former Soviet republics also expressed their dismay and condolences.

The White House said the U.S. government shared information with Russia about a planned attack in Moscow earlier this month and issued a public warning to Americans in Russia on March 7. According to the White House, the Islamic State alone is responsible for the attack.

“There was no Ukrainian involvement at all,” Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the US National Security Council, said on Saturday.

Russian lawmaker Alexander Chinshtein said this The attackers fled in a Renault vehicle which was located by police on Friday night in the Bryansk region, about 340 kilometers southwest of Moscow. He said a chase ensued after they ignored orders to stop.

Khinshtein said a pistol, a magazine for an assault rifle and passports from Tajikistan, a Muslim-majority Central Asian nation that was part of the Soviet Union, were found in the car.

Russia’s BBC news service quoted an anonymous source familiar with the security response as saying: An attacker was killed in the concert hall and another in the car in Bryansk. The BBC said it had a copy of the dead man’s passport, said to be a 30-year-old Tajik citizen.

Interrogation of the suspect

Simonyan released a video in which one of the suspects, a young, bearded man, was seen aggressively interrogated on the side of the road, and responded to a series of shouted questions in heavily accented Russian. He said he flew from Turkey on March 4 and received instructions from unknown people via Telegram to carry out the attack in exchange for money.

The man trembled throughout the interrogation. He was first seen lying face down, his hands tied behind his back and his chin resting on the boot of a man in camouflage uniform. Later they lifted him to his knees.

Meanwhile, another man with cuts and bruises on his face was interviewed by an interpreter sat with his hands on a bench and feet tied.

On Saturday, long queues formed in Moscow to donate blood. According to health authorities, more than 120 people were injured.

With information from Reuters.

ORP