On March 22nd, four gunmen stormed the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, a northern Moscow suburb, and began fighting some of the estimated 6,000 people who were attending a rock concert. The attackers also set fires, which engulfed the venue and caused the roof to collapse.
The U.S. government told Russian officials about a planned threat of an attack on Crocus City Hall more than two weeks before terrorists stormed the Moscow concert venue and killed 144 people. The Russian leader himself publicly dismissed U.S. warnings just three days before the March 22 attack, calling them “outright blackmail” and attempts to “destabilize Russia.”
The U.S. officials familiar with the information that Washington shared with Moscow spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations and intelligence. A spokesperson for the National Security Council declined to comment on this report. Previously, the NSC acknowledged that the United States conveyed information “about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow” but did not say that Crocus City Hall was named as a possible target.
The men who appeared in court on March 25th were arrested in the Bryansk region around 14 hours after the attack, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said. Bryansk is around 400 km (250 miles) southwest of Moscow.
Russian authorities named the four suspects as Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, Shamsidin Fariduni, and Muhammadsobir Fayzov. The video showed three of them being marched, bent double, by masked police and one brought in a wheelchair with no consciousness into Basmanny district court in the Russian capital. Russian security forces leaked videos of brutal interrogation sessions, and reports suggest at least one had suffered electric shocks. The men the court identified as Mirzoyev and Rachabalizoda had black eyes, and the latter’s ear was heavily bandaged, reportedly from it being partially severed during his arrest.
A court statement on the Telegram messaging service said Mirzoyev had “admitted his guilt in full,” while Rachabalizoda also “admitted guilt.” The court also said the four will be held in pre-trial detention until at least the twenty-second of May. These men were identified as citizens of Tajikistan, Russia’s state news agency, Tass said. Ten other people have been arrested in Russia suspected of aiding the attack, including three on Monday afternoon.
This would not be the first time ISIS and its allies have attacked Russia or its people. The group claimed the bombing of a Russian aircraft over Egypt in 2015 with 224 people on board, most of them Russian citizens. It also claimed a 2017 bomb attack on the St. Petersburg metro, which killed 15 people.
Security analysts say the group considers Russia a primary target for several reasons, including the country’s role in destroying IS’s power base in Syria while securing President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, Moscow’s two brutal wars in Muslim-majority Chechnya in 1994–2009, and the Soviet-era invasion of Afghanistan. ISIS frequently criticizes President Vladimir Putin in its propaganda.
