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A police officer stands guard with an anti-drone rifle on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia, on Monday near Crocus City Hall, which suffered a terrorist attack on Friday. Calls were made today for harsh punishments to be meted out to the culprits. for the attack on the Rossiya concert hall, which killed more than 130 people, as the government searched for more bodies in the burned-out ruins of the food and entertainment shopping complex.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said today that the gunmen who killed 139 other people at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow were “radical Islamists,” but reiterated his accusation that Ukraine may have played a role despite their categorical denials.
In a meeting with government officials, Putin said the killings were carried out by extremists “whose ideology the Islamic world has been fighting for centuries. “
Putin, who said over the weekend that the four attackers were arrested as they tried to flee to Ukraine, said investigators had not decided who ordered the attack, but that it was necessary to find out “why the terrorists, after committing their crime, tried to flee. ” in Ukraine and that he was waiting for them there.
The Islamic State’s Afghan associate claimed to have carried out the attack, and U. S. intelligence said it had data confirming the organization was guilty. French President Emmanuel Macron said France had intelligence pointing to “an IS entity” to blame for the attack.
“We see that the United States, through channels, is trying to convince its satellites and other countries of the world that, according to their intelligence, there would be no indication of Kiev in the terrorist attack on Moscow, that the bloody terrorist act was committed by fanatics of Islam, members of the Islamic State group,” Putin said at a meeting with senior law enforcement officials.
He added that “those who the Kiev regime do not need to be accomplices of terrorism and sponsors of terrorism, many questions still remain. “
Putin went on to say that Ukraine had tried to divert attention from its battlefield setbacks through cross-border attacks on Russian regions, adding that “bloody acts of intimidation such as the terrorist attack on Moscow seem to be a logical component of this chain. “”
Friday night’s attack on the Crocus City Hall concert hall in Moscow’s western suburbs left another 139 people dead and more than 180 wounded, the deadliest toll in Russia in years. About 100 more people remain hospitalized, the government said.
Putin has warned that more attacks could follow, citing conceivable Western involvement. He did not mention the precaution of approaching the terror attacks that the U. S. confidentially shared with Moscow two weeks before the raid or with the public. Three days before the attack, Putin had denounced the U. S. Embassy’s March 7 notice urging Americans to avoid crowds in Moscow, adding concerts, as an attempt to scare Russians and “blackmail” the Kremlin in the run-up to the presidential election.
The four alleged attackers, all citizens of Tajikistan, were taken into custody on Sunday afternoon by a Moscow court accused of the attack and ordered to remain in custody pending an official investigation.
Russian media reported that the four men were tortured during interrogations and showed symptoms of having been severely beaten in their court appearance. Russian officials said all four had pleaded guilty to the charges, which carry a life sentence, but that their condition raised questions about whether their statements may have simply been received under duress.
The Russian government said seven other suspects have been arrested and three of them were taken into judicial custody, accused of being involved in the attack.
While riddling spectators with gunfire, the assailants set fire to the large concert hall and caused the roof to collapse as a result.
The search operation will continue until at least Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. A Russian Orthodox priest held a service today, blessing a makeshift monument with incense.
Russian officials and lawmakers have called for harsh punishments for those involved in the attack, with some calling for the death penalty, which has been banned since 1997.
At Sunday’s hearing, 3 of the suspects showed symptoms of significant bruising, in addition to swollen faces. One of them in a wheelchair, dressed in a hospital gown, accompanied by medical staff and sitting with his eyes closed. It appeared to have several cuts.
Another still had a plastic bag around his neck and a third man had his ear heavily bandaged. Russian media reported Saturday that a suspect had his ear cut off during interrogation. The Associated Press may simply not determine the report or the videos purporting to show it.
Dmitry Medvedev, who was Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy head of Putin’s Security Council, suggested “killing everyone involved. “The ones who paid, the ones who sympathized, the ones who helped. Kill them all. “
Margarita Simonyan, director of state television channel RT, said even the death penalty — recently banned in Russia — would be a “too easy” punishment.
Instead, he said, they face “hard labor forced by life somewhere underground, living there too, without the option of seeing the light, with bread and water, with a ban on conversation, and with an inhumane escort. “
Russian human rights activists condemned the violence carried out by the men.
Team Against Torture, a leading organization that campaigns against police brutality, said in a statement that perpetrators will have to be punished seriously, but that “savagery does not deserve to be the answer to savagery. “
He said the price of any testimony received through torture is “extremely low” and that “if the government allows the torture of terror suspects, it can also allow unlawful violence against other citizens. “
Net Freedoms, another Russian organization that focuses on cases of lax speech, highlighted Medvedev’s comments, as well as Putin’s recent call for security to “punish traitors without a statute of limitations, wherever they are,” against a backdrop of “demonstrative protests. ” the torture of detainees. . . It authorizes extrajudicial killings well and instructs security forces on how to deal with enemies.
“We are witnessing the imaginable beginning of a new Great Terror,” Net Freedoms said, referring to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s major repressive measures. The organization predicts increased police brutality against suspects in terrorism-related cases and a buildup of violent crimes against suspects. Immigrants.
Abuses against suspects through law enforcement and security are not new,” said Sergei Davidis of the human rights organization Memorial.
“We are aware of the torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war, we are aware of the mass torture of other people accused of terrorism, high treason and other crimes, especially those that are being investigated by the Federal Security Service. Here, it was made public the first time,” Davidis said.
Parading beaten suspects may simply reflect the authorities’ willingness to show a heavy-handed reaction to defuse any complaints of their failure to salvage the attack, he said.
The attack on the concert hall was an embarrassment for Putin and came less than a week after he consolidated his control over Russia for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since Soviet times.
Many other people on Russian social media have wondered how the government and its vast security apparatus that actively monitors, pressures, and persecutes critics failed to salvage the attack despite the U. S. warning.
Citing the remedy to the suspects, Davidis told the AP that “we can assume that this was intentionally made public to show the severity of the state’s response. “
“People are not satisfied with this scenario when so many law enforcement officials have failed to save themselves from such an attack, and have reacted harshly to prevent the charges from being challenged,” he said.
The fact that security forces have concealed their strategies is “a bad sign,” he said.
ISIS, which fought Russian forces in the Syrian civil war, has long attacked the country. In a report published by the group’s Aamaq news agency, ISIS partner Afghanistan said it carried out an attack in Krasnogorsk, the Moscow suburb where the concert hall is located.
In October 2015, an ISIS bomb brought down a Russian airliner over Sinai, killing the other 224 people on board, most of them Russian tourists returning from Egypt.
The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, has claimed responsibility for several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in recent years. He recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
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