A terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall concert hall, located northwest of Moscow, left at least 133 dead and more than a hundred injured on Friday, according to the Russian Investigative Committee, a fiscal body that reports to the presidency. It is the worst attack in Russia in two decades. At the moment, there is no official confirmation of responsibility for the attack, although the Islamic State claimed responsibility on its Telegram channel, according to Reuters. This Saturday the arrest of 11 suspects was reported, four of them accused of having directly participated in the attack. The following are the data that is known so far:
The place of attack: a concert hall
The Crocus City Hall is located in the city of Krasnogorsk, 25 kilometers northwest of Moscow. A group of people dressed in camouflage entered the concert hall with assault weapons and opened fire just before the group Picnic's performance began, at 8:00 p.m. on Friday (two hours less in mainland Spain). The 6,200 tickets that were available for the event were sold and videos from the scene show the point-blank murder of some attendees while trying to flee.
Other victims
The attackers also caused a fire in the leisure center that houses the concert hall, where a series of children's competitions were being held with children from the Vologda region, located half a thousand kilometers north of Moscow. Russian media reported that numerous people, including children, were trapped in the burning part of the building.
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less than 20 minutes
It all happened in just 18 minutes. According to a chronology from the Russian channel Shot, a white Renault stopped in front of the entrance to the concert hall at 7:55 p.m. in Moscow (two hours less in mainland Spain), where the group Picnic was scheduled to start playing five minutes later. . The terrorists came out of the vehicle with assault weapons and opened fire on the guards and other people present in the building's reception. According to Shot, at 8:03 p.m. they arrived at the auditorium and shot at the spectators. In addition, they set fire to the place with several containers of gasoline that they were carrying with them. Finally, the white Renault Simbol with four terrorists inside left the Crocus hall parking lot at 8:13 p.m.
Who is behind the attack
There is no official confirmation about authorship. Russian media point to citizens of Tajikistan as suspects. A branch of the Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attack on Friday night. The United States and the United Kingdom published an alert of possible terrorist attacks in Russia two weeks ago, shortly after Russian intelligence services announced that they had thwarted an attack by the Islamic State on a synagogue in the Russian capital. Washington stressed in its warning the risk that “events with many people, such as concerts,” would be attacked. The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, minimized the threat and assured: “All this looks like absolute blackmail with the intention of intimidating and destabilizing our society.”
Does Ukraine have anything to do with it?
After the attack, some accusing fingers pointed toward Ukraine as a country with motives to attack Moscow, but Washington said there were no indications that kyiv was behind the terrorist attack. Before the Islamic State's claim became known, kyiv had denied being behind the massacre. Mikhail Podolyak, advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, categorically rejected any connection with the attack. “Ukraine has absolutely and definitely nothing to do with the event. We have an intense, huge, large-scale war with the Russian military and the Russian Federation. And, despite everything, everything will be decided precisely on the Ukrainian battlefield,” Podoliak stressed, adding that the Ukrainian authorities do not use terrorist methods. However, the Kremlin has pointed to a trail from kyiv. The four “direct perpetrators of the terrorist attack,” he said, “tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared on the Ukrainian side to cross the border,” he assured. Although the Russian authorities have not released evidence of this “window” and the Russian-Ukrainian border is today an extremely militarized place and war zone.
Who are the detainees
Among those arrested who were reported this Saturday are four alleged attackers, according to the Russian agency Tass. The Russian Interior Ministry has reported that these four attackers are foreigners. According to leaked information, the car of the alleged perpetrators of the massacre has been intercepted in the Bryansk region, 400 kilometers southwest of Moscow, near the border with Belarus. The exact number of attackers who carried out Friday's attack, and how many of them have been arrested, is currently unknown.
According to information published by the media Baza, Shot and Ostorodzhno, Novosti and also by a State Duma deputy, at least five of the 11 suspects would be citizens of Tajikistan. In fact, they have revealed the identities, including photos, of the suspects. However, the Tajik Interior Ministry has assured that two of them have been in the Central Asian country since November last year, and another of the accused showed the police that he had spent Friday in the Russian city of Samara, about 900 kilometers away. east of Moscow.
What relationship does Tajikistan have with Russia?
Tajikistan, bordering Afghanistan, is one of the hot spots of Islamic terrorism in the post-Soviet space. The Kremlin militarily supports the Dushanbe authorities to control extremist groups that cross that porous border, and the risk of attacks is a concern that usually arises at meetings of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Russian alternative to NATO. Furthermore, Russia has become one of the main targets of ISIS due to its support for both the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria and the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, a traditional ally of another extremist faction that is an enemy of ISIS, Al Qaeda. Tajikistan has sent its condolences to Russia.
The worst attack in two decades
Russia has a long history of terrorist attacks, which shook the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the first years of Vladimir Putin's rule. The majority, framed in the two bloody separatist wars in Chechnya that the Russian leader struck down with an iron fist. The terrible images of the venue, where thousands of people were waiting to attend a concert, are reminiscent of the attack on the Dubrovka theater in the Russian capital in 2002, when a group of Chechen militants staged a gigantic hostage crisis. The operation by Russian security forces to liberate the compound, which used an anesthetic gas, caused 130 deaths.
In 2004, two years after the Dubrovka Street Theater tragedy, a group of Chechen terrorists took 1,200 hostages at a school in the city of Beslan. 334 people died, including 186 children. The most recent attack occurred in 2017, in the Saint Petersburg subway, where 15 people died. Russian authorities linked the attackers to an Islamist group. In 2015, a Russian plane exploded over the Sinai Desert in Egypt with 224 people on board, most of them Russian citizens, in an attack that was claimed by the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
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