Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a national day of mourning on Sunday for the victims of a terrorist attack on a concert hall outside Moscow that killed more than 130 people.
Officials said the bodies of 137 people, including three children, had been recovered from the Crocus City Hall theater following Friday’s attack by assailants who sprayed the crowd with gunfire before setting the venue ablaze.
On Sunday, a crowd of mourners laid flowers and lit candles at a makeshift memorial outside the concert hall.
Mr. Putin said the four gunmen had been apprehended along with at least seven others believed to have involvement in the attack.
“The Federal Security Service and other law enforcement agencies are working diligently to identify and expose the accomplices behind these terrorists: those who provided them with transport, planned escape routes from the crime scene, and prepared caches with weapons and ammunition,” he said Saturday in an address to the nation.
The Islamic State terror group claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack, saying on social media that it had been carried out by members of its Afghan affiliate, known as the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K.
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there was “no doubt” the gunmen were from ISIS-K.
“It has reconstituted itself as we warned would happen when we had this disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. One of the reasons why we didn’t want to withdraw precipitously is because you gave them operating space to reorganize themselves and plan externally,” Sen. Rubio said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Mr. Putin did not mention ISIS-K in his address but insinuated that Ukraine was part of the terrorist plot. He said the gunmen were captured while they fled toward Ukraine, where “a window” had been prepared for them to cross the border.
“The perpetrators cold-bloodedly and deliberately targeted our citizens, including our children, with the intent to kill them at close range,” Mr. Putin said. “Like the Nazis who once carried out massacres in the occupied territories, they planned to stage a demonstrative execution — a bloody act of intimidation.”
Officials in Kyiv said they had no involvement in Friday’s terror attack outside Moscow, a position also taken by the U.S. government. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said blaming others was a common tactic by Mr. Putin and his henchmen.
“They don’t care what’s happening inside their own country. This absolute miserable Putin, instead of attending to his own citizens of Russia and addressing them, remained silent for a day — thinking about how to link this with Ukraine,” Mr. Zelenskyy said. “They have come to Ukraine, burn out cities, and try to blame Ukraine. They torture and rape people, and accuse them. Everything is absolutely predictable.“