Russia announced on Saturday that it had arrested all four gunmen suspected of a shooting massacre at a concert hall outside Moscow, and President Vladimir Putin vowed to hunt down and punish those behind the attack.
Friday’s rampage was claimed by the militant Islamist group Islamic State, but there were indications that Russia was pursuing Ukrainian connections, despite strong denials by Ukrainian officials that Kiev had anything to do with it.
Moscow Regional Governor Andrey Vorobyov said 133 bodies had been pulled from the rubble within 24 hours and doctors were “fighting for the lives of 107 people”. State television editor Margarita Simonyan, without citing a source, previously put the figure at 143.
Putin said in a televised speech that 11 people, including four gunmen, had been detained. “They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them to cross the state border on the Ukrainian side,” he said.
Russia’s FSB security service said the militants had contacts in Ukraine and were captured near the border. It said they were taken to Moscow.
Neither Putin nor the FSB have publicly presented any evidence of links to Ukraine, with which Russia has been at war since Moscow invaded 25 months ago. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said it was typical of Putin and “other thugs” to try to deflect blame.
Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov told Reuters: “Ukraine, of course, was not involved in this terrorist attack. Ukraine is defending its sovereignty against Russian invaders, liberating its own territory and fighting the army and military targets of the occupiers, not civilians.”
Islamic State has a strong incentive to strike Russia, which intervened against it in the 2015 Syrian civil war, and security analysts said the IS claim appeared plausible because it fit a pattern of past attacks.
