At 11.50pm on Friday evening, three hours after the start of the terrorist attack on the Crocus City hall in Moscow which left dozens of corpses on the ground, Telegram channels close to the Russian security services released the first photo of the used white car from the attackers to escape.
A very clear image: two men inside, one with a hat, robust build, a hint of a beard and looking downwards.
The other at the wheel, less recognizable.
A few more hours and the same Telegram channels Baza and Mash posted videos and photos of the first brutal summary interrogations.
Circumstances made public on social media but on which there has been no official confirmation from the Russian authorities.
Official news, however, arrived shortly after 9 in the morning, Italian time, when the Federation's state press agencies spread the news that eleven people, including four alleged terrorists, had been arrested for the massacre in the concert hall.
All from Tajikistan, according to Russian investigators.
None with Tajik nationality, according to the Dushanbe Foreign Ministry, which defined the news of the involvement of its citizens in the terrorist attack as false.
But here are some passages from the not exactly formal interrogations of the Russian agents: "What were you doing at the Crocus?" asks a man from the special units of one of the alleged attackers, holding him by the hair on the ground, face down, while he records it with a smartphone.
“I shot,” the man replies.
"Who did you shoot?" the officer urges him.
“To the people,” says the questioner.
“Why did you do it?”, he urges him.
“For money,” he confesses in a low voice.
In the video published by Baza and relaunched by the Telegram channel of the director of Russia Today television, Margarita Simonyan, the arrested person declares that he is 26 years old, that he agreed to participate in the attack after having listened to the lessons of a preacher a month ago, having been recruited by an aide who offered him 500 thousand rubles (around 5,000 euros).
Of which 250,000 already paid in advance.
He made no reference to any Ukrainian contacts for the escape after the assault.
The images of the man, submissive, scared to death, cannot help but disturb.
But even more so is the video of another of those arrested who the Russian Telegram channels initially show with his head and face bandaged, covered in blood, swollen: the same man who in a video subsequently published on X by the independent Belarusian group Nexta and by the Russian media Meduza he is shown while, held still on the ground in a place that looks like a forest, they cut off his ear with a knife and stick it in his mouth.
Other shocking images show a boy, "19 years old, originally from Dushanbe in Tajikistan", according to Russian Telegram channels, with a very visible wound to his left eye, supine and on the ground, apparently unconscious.
ISIS has once again claimed responsibility for the attack, stating that the attack was carried out by four of its "fighters" whose photos it also published.
The militant group's Amaq news agency on Telegram wrote: "The attack comes in the context of a raging war between the Islamic State and countries fighting Islam."
But everything still remains shrouded in mystery.
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