MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday that the four men who attacked a concert near Moscow were heading towards Ukraine when they were detained, and that they hoped to cross the border.
Putin, addressing the nation, said that some people on the Ukrainian side had prepared to let them cross the border from Russia. Ukraine has denied any involvement in the attack that left at least 133 people dead on Friday night.
All four suspected gunmen are foreign citizens, the Russian interior ministry said.
“They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them from the Ukrainian side to cross the state border,” Putin said.
Putin cast the enemy as “international terrorism” and said that he was ready to work with any state that wanted to defeat it.
“All the perpetrators, organisers and those who ordered this crime will be justly and inevitably punished. Whoever they are, whoever is guiding them,” he said.
“We will identify and punish everyone who stands behind the terrorists, who prepared this atrocity, this strike against Russia, against our people.”
He declared Sunday would be a day of mourning for those who lost their lives at the Crocus City Hall concert venue.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for Friday’s rampage but there were indications that Russia was pursuing a Ukrainian link, despite emphatic denials from Ukrainian officials that Kyiv had anything to do with it.
Islamic State released a photo of what it said were the four attackers behind the shooting rampage, the militant group’s Amaq news agency said on Telegram.
“The attack comes within the context of a raging war between the Islamic State and countries fighting Islam,” Amaq added in a statement.
Roadside interrogation
Margarita Simonyan, a Russian state TV journalist and the head of Russia Today, published a video showing one of the suspects, a young, bearded man, being interrogated aggressively by a roadside, replying in heavily accented Russian to a series of shouted questions.
He said he had flown from Turkey on March 4 and had received instructions from unknown people via Telegram to carry out the attack in exchange for money.
The man was trembling throughout the questioning. He was initially shown lying on his stomach with his hands bound behind his back, his chin resting on the boot of a figure in camouflage uniform. Later he was hauled up onto his knees.
Another man with cuts and bruises to his face was shown being questioned via an interpreter while sitting on a bench with bound hands and feet.
The Kremlin said Putin had held conversations with the leaders of Belarus, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in which all sides affirmed their willingness to work together to fight terrorism.
Neither Putin nor the FSB security service has publicly presented any proof of a link with Ukraine, with which Russia has been waging war for the past 25 months.
Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov told Reuters: “Ukraine was of course not involved in this terror attack. Ukraine is defending its sovereignty from Russian invaders, liberating its own territory and is fighting with the occupiers’ army and military targets, not civilians.”
He said the FSB version that the suspects were arrested en route to Ukraine was “of course another lie from the Russian special services”.