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People lay flowers in memory of the victims of the Moscow terrorist attack.
Today Russia remembers the more than 130 victims of the terrorist attack on a concert hall near Moscow.
© Irina Motina/XinHua/dpa
There is nationwide mourning in Russia for the victims of the terrorist attack on visitors to a concert hall near Moscow.
There is still uncertainty about the background.
Moscow - On a national day of mourning today, Russia remembers the more than 130 victims of the terrorist attack on a concert hall near Moscow.
The terrorist militia Islamic State had already claimed responsibility for the attack, but Russian President Putin saw a “Ukrainian trace” behind the attack - but without providing any evidence for it.
Kiev denied any involvement in the crime.
Abroad, Serbia and Nicaragua joined the commemoration with their own days of mourning.
At least 133 people were killed in the attack on Friday evening, including three children.
More victims could still be found under rubble.
The four main suspects in the terrorist attack were taken to the Russian capital for questioning.
As the state agency Tass also reported, the four men were driven in a highly secured motorcade from the Bryansk region in the south of the country, where they were arrested, to the so-called investigative committee.
An application for an arrest warrant should be submitted to court in the coming days.
They all face life imprisonment, Tass said.
Eleven suspects were arrested after the attack.
Zelenskyj: Moscow always blames others
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj categorically rejected Putin's attempts to attribute shared responsibility for the attack to Ukraine with unsubstantiated accusations.
“Of course, after what happened in Moscow yesterday, Putin and the other bastards are just trying to shift the blame to someone else,” Zelensky said in his daily video address.
The Russian side always uses the same methods.
“And they always blame others.” After the events in the concert hall, “that absolute nobody Putin” remained silent for a day instead of taking care of his Russian citizens.
Rather, Putin was thinking about “how he can bring this to Ukraine.”
Zelensky accused Russia of spreading terror itself.
Russians are coming to Ukraine to burn down cities “and trying to shift the blame to Ukraine.”
They tortured and raped people - and blamed the victims.
“They have brought hundreds of thousands of their own terrorists here, on Ukrainian soil, to fight against us and they don’t care what is happening in their country.”
Putin: Perpetrators would flee towards Ukraine
In a speech broadcast on state television, Putin spoke of Ukraine's alleged involvement in the terrorist attack.
Referring to four of the arrested men, he said: "They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where a window had been prepared for them to cross the border."
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Russia's domestic secret service FSB had previously reported on arrests in the Bryansk border region.
Ukraine, against which Russia has been waging a brutal war of aggression for more than two years, had clearly rejected rumors of involvement the morning after the attack.
Ukrainian military intelligence countered Putin and pointed out that the border had long been mined.
Faeser: The danger from Islamist terror remains acute
Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) currently believes Islamists are responsible for the serious attack on Crocus City Hall.
“Based on everything that is known so far, it can be assumed that the terrorist group “Islamic State Khorasan Province” (ISPK) is responsible for the murderous terrorist attack near Moscow,” she told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”.
This group is currently the biggest Islamist threat in Germany, said Faeser.
“The danger from Islamist terrorism remains acute.”
Khorasan represents a historical region in Central Asia that included parts of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and Iran.
The ISPK terrorist group originated in Afghanistan.
“As is often the case, the group responded to internal failure with a strategy of externalization.
In recent years, ISPK has increasingly attacked targets in the “neighborhood” and also recruited fighters there,” terrorism expert Peter Neumann from King's College in London tweeted in December 2023.
The IS propaganda channel Amak also published a picture of four people whose faces had been blurred out.
The fighters, armed with assault rifles, pistols and bombs, dealt a “severe blow” to Russia, the statement said.
The attack targeted “thousands of Christians in a music hall.”
ISIS fights followers of Christianity and regards them as infidels.
Identification of victims continues - Many blood donations
Meanwhile, forensic experts continued to identify the victims.
So far, 50 victims have been identified, said Governor Andrei Vorobyov.
Many people in the concert hall were burned beyond recognition, it was said.
Almost 4,000 people donated blood by evening to facilitate medical treatment for the injured.
Authorities said at least 147 people were injured, many of them in critical condition.
Clean-up work is ongoing
According to Governor Vorobyov, the clean-up and rescue work in the heavily damaged concert hall in Krasnogorsk, northwest of Moscow, should last at least until this evening.
The hall caught fire during the attack and largely collapsed.
The last embers were extinguished yesterday afternoon, and Russian civil defense employees were then able to begin removing rubble.
There could be more bodies under the rubble.
dpa