Russian law enforcement officers walk at the site of an armed attack on Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, outside Moscow, on March 23, 2024.
stringer | AFP | Getty Images
Russian authorities arrested 11 people, after gunmen stormed a concert hall in Moscow in a horrific attack that killed at least 115 people, state media reported on Saturday.
The Russian Investigative Committee said that four of the detainees were directly involved in the attack, which led to the roof of the sprawling shopping center and music venue burning out.
Russian agencies appear to indicate that the attack is linked to Ukraine, although ISIS claimed responsibility in a statement. A US intelligence official told the Associated Press that US agencies confirmed that group was responsible for the attack.
The Russian Investigative Committee said that the four suspects were arrested in the Bryansk region in western Russia, “not far from the border with Ukraine.” The state news agency TASS, citing Russia's Federal Security Service, said they planned to cross the border into Ukraine and “established contacts” there. According to TASS, the head of the Federal Security Service informed President Vladimir Putin about the arrests on Saturday.
The attack came just days after Putin consolidated his grip on power through a highly coordinated landslide election victory. The attack was the deadliest in Russia in years, and came as fighting in Ukraine entered its third year.
A tricolor Russian national flag flaps in the wind near the burning Crocus City Hall concert hall, the scene of an armed attack, in Krasnogorsk, outside Moscow, on March 23, 2024. Gunmen who opened fire at the Moscow concert hall killed more than 60 people, she said. On March 23, 2024, authorities killed one person and injured more than 100 people while starting a fire, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
stringer | AFP | Getty Images
Shortly after the attack, some Russian lawmakers pointed the finger at Ukraine. Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, denied any involvement.
“Ukraine has never resorted to using terrorist methods,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Everything in this war will only be decided on the battlefield.”
Images published by Russian state media on Saturday showed a fleet of emergency vehicles still gathered outside the ruins of Crocus City Hall, which used to seat more than 6,000 people in Krasnogorsk, on the western edge of Moscow.
Videos posted on the Internet showed armed men at the scene shooting civilians from close range. The roof of the theater, where crowds gathered on Friday to attend a performance by the Russian rock band Picnic, collapsed in the early hours of Saturday morning, while firefighters spent hours fighting a fire that broke out during the attack.
In a statement published by its Amaq news agency, the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan said it had attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk. The validity of this claim could not immediately be verified.
A US intelligence official told the AP that US intelligence agencies had collected information in recent weeks that the ISIS branch was planning an attack in Moscow, and that US officials privately shared the intelligence earlier this month with Russian officials.
The official was briefed on the matter but was not authorized to discuss the intelligence publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Work continues to extinguish the fire at the Crocus City Hall concert hall near Moscow, Russia after reports of a shooting on March 23, 2024.
Ali Koura | Anatolia | Getty Images
Since then, messages of anger, shock and support for those affected have poured in from all over the world.
On Friday, the UN Security Council condemned the “heinous and cowardly terrorist attack” and stressed the need to hold its perpetrators accountable. A spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he also condemned the terrorist attack “in the strongest possible terms.”
Meanwhile, in Moscow itself, hundreds of people lined up on Saturday morning to donate blood and plasma, the Russian Health Ministry said.
Putin, who extended his grip on Russia for another six years in this week's presidential elections after a widespread crackdown on dissent, has publicly denounced Western warnings of a possible terrorist attack as an attempt to intimidate Russians. “All of this is like open blackmail and an attempt to intimidate and destabilize our society,” he said earlier this week.
In October 2015, a bomb planted by ISIS shot down a Russian airliner over Sinai, killing all 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 troubled Caucasus region and other regions in recent years. He recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
