Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
Including this one, today’s articles on the attack can be seen here, here, here, here, and here. Yesterday’s reports can be seen here, here, and here. The round-up of first reports, on Saturday, is here.
As the "Caucasian Knot" wrote, information about the responsibility of the terrorist organization "Islamic State" for the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall was published on the day of the terrorist attack, March 22, on its website by the organization monitoring the activity of "IS". The version of ISIS involvement in the terrorist attack was also voiced by Reuters and The New York Times and Al Arabiya. However, The New York Times indicated that American officials in March collected intelligence that the Afghanistan-based Islamic State-Khorasan was planning an attack in Moscow, and Russia was warned about it.
On the evening of March 22, armed people broke into the Crocus City Hall concert hall in Krasnogorsk near Moscow and opened fire there, and the building was also set on fire. As a result of the terrorist attack, according to the Russian Investigative Committee as of March 24, 137 people were killed, and another 154 people were hospitalized after the terrorist attack. The stated number of victims is not final; investigators and criminologists are still continuing to work at the site of the terrorist attack.
Today, the Telegram channel Directorate 4, which monitors militant activity, released a video allegedly filmed by participants in the attack on visitors to Crocus City Hall. The description of the video states that this "video of the attack at Crocus City Hall, filmed by the attackers," was taken from a resource associated with the Islamic State. “For ethical reasons, we are publishing only a fragment. In other footage, terrorists cut the throat of one of the victims,” the annotation to the video says.
The 66-second video shows several armed men in the building. Their faces in the video are retouched and their voices are distorted. At the beginning of the video, one of them gives a signal to another armed man, who then walks past the door behind which people are hiding and opens fire on them. Bodies of people are visible on the floor. At the end of the video, the attackers walk along the building's lobby, talking to each other.
“Two men in this video have the same clothes as those detained in the footage from the Bryansk region, one man has the same sneakers,” noted the authors of the publication in the telegram channel “Agency. News”, commenting on the above-mentioned video distributed resource associated with the Islamic State.
"Caucasian Knot" cannot verify the authenticity of this video.
On March 23, the FSB reported the arrest of 11 suspects in connection with the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall. Four of them were detained in the Bryansk region. According to the FSB, they were traveling towards the border with Ukraine to hide there, and they had relevant contacts on the Ukrainian side. Vladimir Putin made an appeal in connection with the terrorist attack and stated that a “window” had been prepared at the Ukrainian border for the passage of those who committed the terrorist attack. Ukraine, however, declared its non-involvement in the terrorist attack in Krasnogorsk and categorically rejected the accusations voiced by Putin.
The attack on Crocus City Hall came two weeks after the US Embassy in Russia warned that terrorists were planning an attack in Moscow, Reuters reported on March 23. Moreover, just a few hours before this warning, the FSB reported that it had prevented an attack by ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) militants on the synagogue, the agency indicated.
The FSB reported on March 7 that the activities of the Afghan IS cell, Vilayat Khorasan, whose members were planning a terrorist attack on a Moscow synagogue, were suppressed in the Kaluga region. “It has been established that MTO militants are preparing to carry out an attack on synagogue parishioners using firearms. When detained, the terrorists offered armed resistance to Russian FSB officers and, as a result, were neutralized by return fire,” says a publication on the FSB website.
The Russian FSB report of March 7 adds weight to the version of the involvement of ISIS-Khorasan in the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall, because the agency officially admitted that members of this terrorist organization were interested in carrying out a terrorist attack in Moscow and were preparing for it, that such the terrorist attack was their goal.
ISIS-Khorasan, which calls its goal the creation of a caliphate in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran, has in recent years actively criticized the policies of Putin, who changed the course of the war in Syria by intervening in it in 2015 and supporting Bashar al-Assad in the fight against the opposition and the Islamic State, writes Reuters.
In January 2024, IS claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack in the Iranian city of Kerman, which killed 95 people. At the same time, as in the case of the claim of responsibility for the terrorist attack in Krasnogorsk, IS did not indicate the regional branch that carried out the attack, noted BBC expert on extremist groups Mina Al-Lami.
There are “quite a lot in common” between the attacks in Kerman and Krasnogorsk, including a significant number of casualties, as well as the fact that both attacks were carried out in countries where IS does not have a significant presence, active affiliates or support base.
The group and its supporters will view these two major attacks this year as a major propaganda coup that IS hopes will help restore its image as a global threat and boost recruitment efforts, although they follow a difficult year for IS. full of failures,” Mina Al-Lami was quoted as saying by the BBC on March 23.
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