Alberto Rojas

Updated Saturday, March 23, 2024-20:23

  • Terror in Moscow Russia says it has arrested all participants in the "savage" Moscow attack

  • Terror in Moscow The attack in Moscow opens an unexpected front for Putin and his security promises, having ignored warnings

The Islamic State of Khorasan, an Asian branch of the jihadist group, has done everything possible to claim responsibility for the bloody attack on Friday night at the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk.

Despite having acknowledged their responsibility in their usual channels

, having told how they did it (three guys shoot people at point-blank range while one burns the room with incendiary bombs) and even publishing a photo of the commando just before committing their infamy and a video Subsequently,

the Kremlin has already put a different narrative in the hands of its propaganda

: Ukraine is involved.

Vladimir Putin assured in a recorded message that the terrorists "

tried to escape from

Russia

and were heading to Ukraine,

where, according to preliminary data, a window on the Ukrainian side had been prepared for them to cross the border." Of course, he offered no proof of anything. The Russian autocrat promised "revenge" and "punishment" to the terrorists who killed 133 people and highlighted that 11 people have already been arrested in connection with the attack, the largest that Russia has suffered since the Beslan massacre 20 years ago.

What the FSB (Federal Security Service) did do was offer videos of four of those detainees, of Tajik origin, whose clothes apparently coincide with those worn by the Islamic State terrorists in the photo, while they are being violently interrogated.

In one of them you can even see how they cut off one of their ears and make them eat it

. Meanwhile, the detainees stammer that they committed the murders "for a million rubles."

Geolocation experts have found the point that appears in those videos, which is in the Bryansk region,

but much closer to the border with Belarus

than to that of Ukraine. It is assumed that they fled in the same white Renault with which they arrived at the concert hall and that factor is what caught the attention of the agents. Zelensky's cabinet categorically denied that kyiv had anything to do with the attack on Russian territory, a message supported by the United States, which warned a few days ago of imminent attacks in Moscow.

Russian propaganda, which in these cases happily adheres to what the Kremlin dictates, began to launch the idea of ​​the alleged involvement of the Ukrainian embassy in Tajikistan,

a plot twist as incredible as it was predictable

. Margarita Simonyan, the director of the RT channel, assured: "It is not the Islamic State, they are all Ukrainians."

The problem with the theory of the Ukrainian connection is that

the possible border crossing of terrorists from the Russian side to the Ukrainian side is implausible to say the least

. Right now there is no line more guarded, militarized and mined than that. To think that four armed guys were going to drive through it in a Renault is something that no Hollywood scriptwriter would accept as possible.

During yesterday morning the rescue teams continued working at the premises, which woke up with the roof collapsed due to the flames.

The victims now amount to 133 dead

- according to the latest balance sheet - and hundreds of wounded, some from gunshot wounds and others suffocated by smoke.

The testimonies of the survivors are emerging in the Russian national but also international media, collected by the few foreign reporters who still remain. Irene Soave, from

Corriere della Sera

, tells how the loudspeakers began to say that the concert was canceled for technical reasons. "

I bumped into a girl on the first floor covered in blood

," she says. Many comment that they confused the shots, at first, with sound effects.

"I thought I would be an orphan: my mother was there in the front row with her friends," Mijail told the Meduza website. "She came back in a taxi, terrified and black with smoke, covered in ash, with her lips bitten," she added. Other witnesses tell the media that the security at the entrance

did not carry out the usual checks on bags and jackets

, and that the metal detectors were turned off, while other witnesses affirm that the latter were in operation. Despite the censorship that prevails in today's Russia, criticism of the security breach represented by such an attack in Moscow is beginning to be heard on the Telegram channels of certain Russian military bloggers.

Meanwhile, European leaders published a coordinated message about the attack: "I strongly condemn the terrorist attack against civilians in Moscow."