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DUSHANBE – Tajik authorities detained relatives of four Tajik men accused of storming a Moscow-region concert hall and gunning down scores of people. The relatives have been questioned as part of a widening Russian investigation.
The probe comes as Russian authorities charged an eighth man in connection with the March 22 attack, Russia’s worst terrorist violence in two decades.
The Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility for the attack on the Crocus City Hall, where people were taking their seats for a concert by a Soviet-era rock band when four men began gunning people down, and then set fire to the venue.
As of March 26, the death toll stood at 139, with more than 120 people wounded, many hospitalized with gunshot wounds or burns.
Four ethnic Tajik men who worked as migrant laborers in Russia have been accused of staging the attack. The four appeared in a Moscow court on March 24, and were ordered held in pretrial detention. All four showed signs of being severely beaten, and unconfirmed reports said they may have been tortured while in custody.
In the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, and several surrounding towns, law enforcement authorities went to the homes of relatives of the men, and took them back to the capital for questioning, neighbors and relatives told RFE/RL.
In Vahdat, a town just east of Dushanbe, the mother, brother, two uncles, and other relatives of one of the accused gunmen — Saidakram Rajabalizoda — were taken away by police on the evening of March 25, a domestic employee told RFE/RL. Other neighbors said that the head of the neighborhood where the family lived was also taken by police.
An unknown number of relatives of another of the suspected gunmen — Muhammadsobir Faizov — were taken from their homes in Dushanbe, neighbors told RFE/RL.
Tajik authorities have made no statement about the detentions. The Foreign Ministry issued a statement hours after the attack, refuting reports identifying three other Tajik men who allegedly participated in the attack, but has made no further comment.
In Moscow, Russians flocked to the venue to lay flowers and mourn the dead, while rescue workers picked through the wreckage of the concert hall, which was gutted by a fire shortly after the shooting.
Russian authorities charged an eighth man in connection with the attack, according to the state news agency TASS. Moscow’s Basmanny District Court ordered the detention of Alisher Kasimov, a Kyrgyz-born Russian citizen, accusing him of allegedly renting an apartment to the four attackers.
Kasimov’s detention brings the number of people ordered held in custody to eight as of March 26; 11 people in all have been detained by police, according to officials.
A day earlier, a Moscow court ordered three men held on charges related to their providing a car and an apartment to the attackers.
‘Radical Islamists’
Meeting with government officials late on March 25, Putin said the attack was carried out by extremists “whose ideology the Islamic world has been fighting for centuries.”
“We know that the crime was committed by radical Islamists,” he said.
But Putin also repeated earlier suggestions from other officials that Ukraine, and the United States, had a role to play, without providing evidence. Authorities said the four Tajik men had been detained in a region close to the Ukrainian and Belarusian border.
“The question immediately аrises: Who benefited from it?” he said. “This atrocity can be just another element in a series of attempts of those who have been at war with our country since 2014.
“Of course, it is necessary to answer that same question: Why after committing the crime did the terrorists try to go to Ukraine? Who was waiting for them there?” he said.
Nikolai Patrushev, the hawkish director of Russia’s Security Council, repeated that allegation when asked by reporters in passing whether Kyiv or the Islamic State group was behind the attack.
“Of course, Ukraine,” he said.
In Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy again vehemently denied any involvement, saying in his nightly video address that Putin was always seeking to blame “someone else.”
“Again, he accuses Ukraine. A sick and cynical creature,” Zelenskiy said. “Everyone is a terrorist to him except for himself although he has been fueled by terror for two decades already.”
U.S. officials have also dismissed the assertions, saying publicly that intelligence showed Islamic State was behind the attack. And French President Emmanuel Macron also said a branch of Islamic State “planned the attack and carried it out,” adding the same group had plotted attacks in France.
The images of the four Tajik men, shown badly beaten, drew criticism and questions about the Russian authorities’ methods.
Video that circulated on Telegram purported to show one of the men having his ear cut off and stuffed into his mouth. Another Telegram channel known to be linked to the Wagner mercenary group published a photograph purporting to show one of the detained men with his genitals attached to an electric wire.
Team Against Torture, a Russian organization that advocates against police brutality, said in a statement that the culprits must face stern punishment, but “savagery should not be the answer to savagery.”
Asked on March 25 about the men’s condition, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to answer.
“I am leaving this question without an answer,” he told reporters.
About two weeks before the attack, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow released an unusual warning, saying radical “extremists” might be plotting to target public locations, and urged American citizens to be careful.
The warning was met with derision by officials, including Putin, who suggested it was aimed at embarrassing him ahead of a presidential election that he ultimately ended up winning.
Speaking in Washington on March 25, White House national-security adviser John Kirby said U.S. officials shared the intelligence warnings ahead of time, under a tenet of the U.S. intelligence community called the “duty to warn.”
That’s a years-old executive order that obliges U.S. intelligence officials to lean toward sharing knowledge of a threat if conditions allow. That’s even if the apparent targets are adversaries.
“Yeah, look, there’s not going to be security assistance with Russia and the United States,” Kirby told reporters on March 25.
“We had a duty to warn them of information that we had, clearly that they didn’t have. We did that,” he said.
In Turkey, meanwhile, a security official said two of the alleged attackers had traveled “freely” between the country and Russia since there was no warrant for their arrest. The unnamed official spoke on condition of anonymity to AFP.
With reporting by RFE/RL’s Russian Service and Current Time
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