Vladimir Putin blames West for Moscow hall massacre

The Russian president said that the attack had been carried out by ‘radical Islamists’, but that the perpetrators had been aided by Kyiv and its allies.

Vladimir Putin on Monday holds a meeting on measures taken after the massacre in the Crocus City Hall. Picture: AFP

President Vladimir Putin has sought to blame the West for an attack by Islamic State near Moscow that killed at least 139 people.

The assault by heavily armed gunmen on the Crocus City Hall concert venue on Friday night was the deadliest terrorist attack claimed by Islamic State in Europe and the worst in Russia since 2004. ISIS has published a graphic video showing its gunmen shooting at random inside the venue.

Putin said on Monday night the killings had been carried out by “radical Islamists”, but suggested the terrorists had been aided by Western countries and Ukraine. “This atrocity may be only (another) link in a whole series of attempts by those who have been fighting our country since 2014 through the hands of the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime,” Putin said in comments published by the Kremlin. “We know who carried out the attack. We want to know who the mastermind was.”

Russia has arrested four suspected gunmen it identified as citizens of Tajikistan, an impoverished, mainly Muslim country bordering Afghanistan. It has charged another three men it says were accomplices. Putin has claimed, without showing evidence, that the terrorists were fleeing towards Ukraine. “Who was waiting for them there?” he said on Monday.

Critics have said Putin is trying to portray the attack as the work of Ukraine and its Western allies as a pretext for a new round of nationwide mobilisation. US officials confirmed Islamic State in Khorasan was responsible. The group has targeted Russia over the Kremlin’s backing of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Two years ago, ISIS-K claimed a suicide bombing outside the Russian embassy in Kabul that killed at least six people.

In Paris, President Emmanuel Macron said France had intelligence that the attack was carried out by ISIS, and warned Russia against exploiting the killings.

Russian officials called for the return of the death penalty for terrorists, which opposition figures fear could lead to the executions of Putin’s critics. While the death penalty is legal in Russia, the Kremlin has not sanctioned any executions since a moratorium was introduced by Boris Yeltsin in 1996.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin was not involved “at the moment” in talks about the revival of capital punishment. He declined to comment on videos that seemed to show the suspects being tortured by the security services. A Russian online disinformation campaign is trying to pin the blame for the attack on Britain, Ukraine and the US by publishing fake articles that purport to be from Western media.

The Times