Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev called for those who carried out the terror attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall to be killed on Monday.
“Should we kill them? We should. And we will,” Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel. “But it is even more important to kill everyone who was involved. Everyone. Those who paid, those who sympathised, those who helped. Kill them all.”
Medvedev also congratulated those responsible for capturing the four suspected attackers in Russia’s Bryansk region on Saturday as they attempted to flee. Earlier on Monday, the Russian Defence Ministry announced that the State Border Protection servicemen responsible for their arrests had been awarded medals “for bravery” and departmental medals “for combat honours”.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) on Saturday announced the detention of 11 men suspected of planning the attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall. The FSB later said that all four perpetrators had also been detained. The four men, all of whom exhibited clear signs of violent abuse, were charged with terror offences on Sunday night and were remanded in pretrial custody for two months.
At a briefing with reporters on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that he didn’t have the right to comment on the possible involvement of Islamic State in the attack during an ongoing investigation.
When asked about the suspects’ visible injuries, Peskov responded “I’ll leave that question unanswered,” though he did say that Putin had not changed his schedule in light of the attack, not did he plan to visit the site of the shooting, where there is now a large makeshift memorial to the victims.