Day of immense pain in Russia. Thousands and thousands of people went throughout the day yesterday to the Crocus City Hall, the leisure center and concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow where a group of attackers killed at least 137 people in cold blood in the attack on Friday biggest terrorist in Russia since the Dubrovka theater and Beslan school hijackings.
After parking the car or leaving the subway, most approached it little by little, at least without talking to the people nearby, some protected from the light rain with an umbrella. They brought flowers, toys, stuffed animals, balloons and candles to leave next to the building where the last Russian tragedy took place. “It’s a silence of pain, do you understand?” says Ielena, a woman who has just shown respect for the victims after standing for an hour in one of the two long queues of a kilometer each, where every few minutes incorporated new sufferers.
“What happened hurts me a lot, because they killed our people. I haven’t been able to stop crying since then, I couldn’t stay at home, I was suffocating”, he tells La Vanguardia with a broken voice and tearful eyes before the tears force him to apologize. Another woman, Maria, also moved, only managed to say: “They even killed children…”.
According to the latest official count published yesterday by the Investigative Committee, which in Russia is in charge of major crimes, the fatalities reach at least 137, including three minors. The Moscow Ministry of Health reported 180 injured. Russian media reports that some survivors took more than a day to seek medical help because they were in a state of shock.
Entire families arrived at the memorial at the entrance to the Crocus City Hall, which is in the municipal district of Krasnogorsk, on the outskirts of Moscow. Some with strollers for children. Many children participated by carrying a couple of carnations themselves.
“This cannot go unpunished, all the culprits must be caught. They have simply done this because they hate us. They didn’t do it for anything else”, expressed a young man, Aleksei, about to join one of the ranks.
The terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall took place on Friday night, March 22, just before the start of a concert by the Russian rock group Piknik, attended by around 6,000 spectators.
Armed men broke into the building opening fire on every defenseless person they found. They then entered the auditorium, where they fired in all directions and caused an avalanche of fire from the audience. They then burned down the premises and fled. The concert hall was completely gutted and the fire could not be fully brought under control until Saturday night.
On the same day, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) announced the arrest of 11 suspects. Four were identified as the attackers who directly executed the coup. The FSB said they were arrested in the Briansk region as they were traveling in a Renault Symbol car heading for Ukraine.
The Russian president confirmed the information in a recorded message to the nation on Saturday. Vladimir Putin assured that “from the Ukrainian side they had opened a hole for them to cross the state border” and escape.
Both the power and the allied media have tried to put the entire burden of proof on the Ukrainian track, despite the fact that Kyiv has categorically denied having anything to do with it and despite the fact that also on the same Friday a branch of the terrorist group Islamic State ( IS ) claimed responsibility for the attack.
Investigation Committee investigators found at the scene of the massacre more than 500 bullet casings, 28 automatic weapons magazines and two Kalashnikov assault rifles. A Makarov pistol and a rifle magazine were confiscated from those arrested in Briansk.
Yesterday the Committee of Instruction released a video of masked and uniformed agents taking the four gunmen to the headquarters of this body. With their eyes blindfolded and their hands handcuffed behind their backs, they forced the detainees to walk bent over. Investigators must request a court to remand them. Of the other seven arrested, nothing has been known, and it is not known what their involvement is in the terrorist attack.
Moscow last suffered a major bout of terrorism in 2011, when a bomb attack killed 37 and injured 172 at Domodedovo International Airport, but attacks on the scale of the current one are more comparable to the hijacking of the Dubrovka theater in the Russian capital in 2002, in which 132 people died, and the kidnapping on the first day of the school year in 2004 in Beslan, in the Caucasus, in which 333 people died, including 186 children.
“We are facing different terrorists. Those had an ideology, a goal, and that’s why they killed. But that doesn’t make sense now, it’s killing people just to kill people,” says another of the visitors to the makeshift memorial in front of the Crocus City Hall, a middle-aged man, Nikolai, with the bouquet of flowers still in his hands.
The director of the RT television channel, Margarita Simonian, published a video of the interrogation of one of the detainees on Saturday. The man said he had been promised around half a million rubles (about 5,000 euros) to carry out the attack and that he did not know exactly who had hired him.
Next to the memorial there is a truly emotional scene. After leaving the offering, a tall and strong man is overcome with emotion and bursts into tears. A volunteer accompanies him to find comfort as he slowly walks away.
While Russians mourned the dead, the investigation continued. Rescue teams are still searching through the debris left by the fire and updating the number of victims. The Investigation Committee indicated that it has identified 62, and that it will have to do DNA analysis for the rest. And the security agencies and the police continue the search for the organizers of the massacre.
Former president Dmitry Medvedev, who is now deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, wrote on Telegram: “We will avenge them all. And those involved, regardless of country of origin or status, will from now on be our legitimate and main target”.
On Saturday, Putin assured that “all the authors, organizers and those who commissioned this crime will receive a well-deserved and irremediable punishment”. And several politicians and analysts advocated yesterday to lift the moratorium on the death penalty, in force in Russia since 1996.
Flags at half-mast and flowers in honor of the innocent victims were seen in many other cities across the country, as well as in front of Russian embassies in countries around the world. Putin went to the chapel at his residence in Novo-Ogariovo, outside Moscow, to light a candle for the dead, his spokesman said. On giant screens in streets, shopping centers or metros, the still image of a burning candle and, together with the date of the attack, “22.03.2024”, a single word: Skorbim, were broadcast throughout the day. We are in mourning.