the blitz, the Islamist trail, Putin’s silence –

Horror comes to the heart of Russia. 82 people died and at least 116 were injured (regarding sixty in very serious conditions) in the terrorist attack in a concert hall, the Crocus City Hall, on the outskirts of Moscow. The attack was followed by a huge fire and deaths might increase. It is the worst terrorist attack in Russia in the last 20 years. The police are still looking for the terrorists and in the meantime they are analyzing material evidence, the weapons and ammunition abandoned on site, but also the recordings of the video surveillance cameras, which have been seized.

Law enforcement arrested two suspects. A pistol, a magazine for an AKM assault rifle and passports of Tajik citizens were found in the stopped car. This was announced by the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein. This was reported by the Tass agency. «According to initial information, the Renault, in which the suspicions were moving, was found at night near the village of Khatsun, Karachi district, Bryansk region. The car did not stop at the request of the police and tried to escape,” he wrote on the Telegram channel. Khinshtein added that during the chase, gunfire broke out, the car overturned. «One terrorist was arrested on the spot, the others fled into the forest. After the search, at approximately 03:50, a second suspect was found and arrested. The search for the others continues.”

At least four men, wearing camouflage suits and armed to the teeth, broke into the hall where a band called Picnic was supposed to perform. The attack began simultaneously in the auditorium and the foyer, where people were still queuing to enter the hall. The videos recorded chilling images, men shooting at close range, even bodies lying on the ground. The concert was sold out and it is estimated that there were over 6 thousand people inside the venue when the flames broke out which then caused the roof of the building to collapse. It took firefighters hours to put out the fire in the room which also houses a shopping center and is located just outside Moscow, in the city of Krasnogorsk. The structure is very well known and is the same one where the Miss Universe competition wanted by Donald Trump took place in 2013.

Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president who is now deputy head of the National Security Council, has implied that Ukraine – the country Russia invaded two years ago – was behind the attack and has vowed revenge. Kiev has denied any responsibility but in the meantime the attack has been claimed by ISIS, a claim judged credible by the USA. The Biden administration itself makes it known that it had warned the Russians of the imminent risk of an attack: it recalled the “duty to warn” and provide intelligence information when dramatic. Among other things, in recent days the State Department had also issued an alert to its fellow citizens in Russia inviting them to avoid public places, “including concert halls”. US sources confirm the trail of Islamic terrorism, say CBS and the English BBC, citing intelligence sources who confirm the presence of a “constant flow of information”, dating back to November, on ISIS’s intention to strike in Russia. Some very specific information was also passed on to the Russian government, despite the frosty relations between Washington and Moscow. Among the 62 injured, around sixty are in critical condition, including some children. And on Russian Telegram channels, an unverified number of deaths is circulating that is decidedly higher than that admitted by the authorities.

Sergey Sobyanin, mayor of Moscow, has canceled events that were supposed to take place this weekend in the Russian capital, which is dotted with billboards reading ‘We are in mourning’ on the streets. The country is in shock and remembers the attacks by Chechen Islamists: the one in a theater in Moscow in 2002, which caused over 170 deaths; and following Moscow’s repression of Islamist insurrections in Chechnya and Dagestan, the 2017 suicide bomb attack in the St. Petersburg subway in which 15 people died. Vladimir Putin has not spoken so far but has been kept updated on minute-by-minute events.