Day of immense pain in Russia. Thousands and thousands of people came yesterday all day to the Crocus City Hall, the leisure center and concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow where on Friday a group of gunmen killed at least 137 people in cold blood in the largest city. terrorist attack in Russia since the kidnappings of the Dubrovka theater and the Beslan school.
After parking their car or leaving the subway, the majority approached slowly, without even speaking to their loved ones, some protected from the fine 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, you understand?” says Yelena, a woman who has just shown her respect for the victims after spending an hour standing in one of two long lines of one kilometer each, which every few minutes They incorporated new afflicted people.
“What happened hurts me a lot, because they killed our people. I can't stop crying since then, I couldn't stay home, I was drowning,” she explains to La Vanguardia with a broken voice and teary eyes before tears force her to apologize. Another woman, María, also emotional, only manages 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 amount to at least 137, including three minors. The Moscow Health Ministry reported 180 injuries. Russian media indicate that some survivors took more than a day to seek medical help as they were in a state of shock.
Entire families came to the memorial at the entrance to the Crocus City Hall, which is located in the Krasnogorsk municipality, on the outskirts of Moscow. Some with baby strollers. Many children participated by bringing a couple of carnations themselves.
“This cannot go unpunished, we must catch all the guilty parties. They just did this because they hate us. "They haven't done it for anything else," said a young man, Alexei, about to join one of the lines.
The terrorist attack against Crocus City Hall occurred on the night of Friday, March 22, just before a concert by the Russian rock group Piknik began, attended by about 6,000 spectators.
Armed men broke into the building, opening fire on any defenseless person they found in their path. They then entered the auditorium, where they fired shots in all directions and caused the audience to stampede. Later, they burned the facilities and fled. The concert hall burned completely and the fire could not be fully controlled until Saturday night.
That same day, the Russian security services (FSB) announced the arrest of 11 suspects. Four of them were identified as the gunmen who directly carried out the hit. The FSB said that they were detained in the Bryansk oblast, while they were driving in a Renault Simbol car towards Ukraine.
The Russian president confirmed this information in a message to the nation recorded the same 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 related media have tried to put the entire burden of proof on the Ukrainian trail, despite the fact that Kyiv has categorically denied having anything to do with it and despite also the fact that on Friday a branch of the State terrorist group claimed responsibility for the attack. Islamic (IS).
Investigators from the Investigative Committee found more than 500 bullet casings, 28 automatic weapons magazines and two Kalashnikov assault rifles at the site of the massacre. A Makarov pistol and a rifle magazine were seized from those detained in Bryansk.
Yesterday the Investigative Committee released a video of masked and uniformed agents taking the four gunmen to the headquarters of this organization. Blindfolded and with their hands handcuffed behind their backs, the detainees were forced to walk bent over. Investigators must petition a court to be placed in preventive detention. Nothing has been heard from the other seven arrested, and it is not known what their involvement in the terrorist attack is.
Moscow suffered the last major blow of terrorism in 2011, when a bomb attack left 37 dead and 172 injured at Domodedovo international airport. But attacks of the magnitude of the current one are more comparable to the kidnapping of the Dubrovka theater in the Russian capital in 2002, in which 132 people died, and the kidnapping of the Beslan school in the Caucasus on the first day of school in 2004. , in which 333 people died, including 186 minors.
“We are faced with different terrorists. They had an ideology, an objective and that's why they killed. But this doesn't make sense right now, it's killing people simply for the sake of killing people," says another of the visitors to the improvised memorial in front of Crocus City Hall, a middle-aged man named Nikolai, with his bouquet of flowers still in his hands. .
The director of the RT television channel, Margarita Simonián, published on Saturday a video of the interrogation of one of the detainees. The man said that he had been promised around half a million rubles (about 5,000 euros) for carrying out the attack and that he did not know exactly who had hired him.
Next to the memorial there is some truly emotional scene. After leaving his offering, a tall, strong man is overcome with emotion and bursts into tears. A volunteer accompanies him to find comfort as he slowly walks away.
While the Russians mourned the dead, the investigation continued. Rescue teams are still searching through the rubble left by the fire and updating the casualty count. The Investigative Committee indicated that it has identified 62 of them, and that it will have to do DNA analysis for the rest. And security agencies and police continue the search for the organizers of the massacre.
Former President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now deputy head of the Russian Security Council, wrote on Telegram: “We will avenge them all. And those involved, regardless of their country of origin or status, will from now on be our legitimate and main objective.”
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 yesterday advocated lifting the moratorium on the death penalty, in force in Russia since 1996.
Flags at half-mast and flowers laid 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 of his residence in Novo-Ogariovo, outside Moscow, to light a candle for the dead, his spokeswoman said. On giant screens in streets, shopping centers or subways, the still image of a burning candle was broadcast throughout the day and, next to the date of the attack, “03.22.2024”, a single word: skorbim. We are in mourning.
