Verified footage showed camouflage-clad gunmen opening fire with automatic weapons in the Crocus City Hall near Moscow. Video showed people taking their seats, then rushing for the exits as repeated gunfire echoed above screams.
Investigators said some died from gunshot wounds and others in a huge fire that broke out in the complex.Reports said the gunmen had lit the blaze using petrol from canisters they carried in rucksacks.
People fled in panic. Baza, a news outlet with good contacts in Russian security and law enforcement, said 28 bodies were found in a toilet and 14 on a staircase. “Many mothers were found embracing their children,” it said.
Long lines formed in Moscow on Saturday for people to donate blood. Health officials said more than 120 people were wounded. Russia tightened security at airports, transport hubs and across the capital and big public events were cancelled across the country.
IS, which once sought control over swathes of Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for the attack, the group’s Amaq agency said on Telegram. IS said its fighters attacked on the outskirts of Moscow, “killing and wounding hundreds and causing great destruction to the place before they withdrew to their bases safely”. The statement gave no further detail. On Saturday it released a photograph of what it said were the four attackers.
A US official said it had intelligence confirming IS’s claim of responsibility for the shooting. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity said Washington had warned Moscow “appropriately” in recent weeks of the possibility of an attack. Friday’s attack, about 20km from the Kremlin, happened two weeks after the US embassy in Russia warned that “extremists” had imminent plans for an attack in Moscow.
Hours before the embassy warning, FSB said it had foiled an attack on a Moscow synagogue by IS’s affiliate in Afghanistan, known as ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K, which seeks a caliphate across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran. Putin changed the course of the Syrian war by intervening in 2015, supporting President Bashar al-Assad against the opposition and IS. “ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years, frequently criticising Putin in its propaganda,” said Colin Clarke of the Soufan Center, a New York-based research group.
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