The Islamic State jihadist militia claims responsibility for the attack in Moscow, but the Russian leadership prefers to point the finger at Ukraine. A torture video by the Russian security forces fuels suspicion of IS: The victim can also be seen in a propaganda video.
“Open your damn mouth,” a voice from the background whispers to a young man. He looks into the camera with a bloody face and T-shirt, a burst and swollen nose and a thick bandage around his head. “You only have one ear left,” the voice threatens angrily. Another video from a forest area explains things: in it, the man lying on the ground and tied up is being forced by the security forces to eat his ear after it had apparently been cut off shortly before.
These are disturbing recordings that Russian security forces apparently published after the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall as evidence of their successful hunt for the perpetrators and which at the same time again suggest that the jihadist militia Islamic State (IS) is responsible for the attack that left at least 133 dead Responsible near Moscow on Friday evening.
IS terrorist captured
The young man in the video from the Russian security forces can also be found in another recording: IS had distributed it almost simultaneously on Telegram in a channel run by the IS propaganda organ Amaq. In the no less disturbing footage, several men can be heard and seen armed with assault rifles and knives, apparently in the entrance hall of Crocus City Hall. Then one of the men enters the concert hall and apparently fires at several visitors at close range, killing them. Numerous lifeless bodies lie around them, and a fire can be seen in the background.
The faces and voices of the attackers have been made unrecognizable in the minute and a half long IS recording, but the suspect from the Russian security forces’ video can still be located in the IS terrorist video: The blood is missing in the IS recording, but the young man is wears the same beige T-shirt in both shots. The print on the T-shirt also matches in both shots. The shoes are also identical, like observers on the internet recognize.
In at least two cases, the Russian security forces appear to have caught the right perpetrators, because another man who can be recognized in the IS recording is later presented as a terrorist by Russian investigators.
“My friends know the city better”
When asked, the terrorist whose ear was cut off by Russian security forces introduced himself in the recording as Rajab Ali Zada. With a lot of effort he can also say in Russian that he was born on February 4th and is 30 years old. He couldn’t say where he threw away his assault rifle. “My friends know the city better,” he explains. The ntv verification team can confirm the information, even if the young man in the recording speaks very unclearly due to the serious facial injuries.
It remains unclear where the young man comes from. Russian media, a Russian MP, and also Russian security forces themselves had located the suspects in Islamic Tajikistan. The primary official language of the Central Asian republic is Tajik, a dialect of the Persian language. Russian is also widely spoken, mainly due to the economic relations between Russia and Tajikistan. It is a compulsory subject in many schools.
This fits in with the confession that IS also spread on the propaganda portal Amaq a few hours after the attack, but which has so far been ignored by the Russian leadership because it is trying to establish a connection with Ukraine. In the confession, the offshoot “Islamic State Khorasan Province”, which is abbreviated as ISPK or ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for the crime. According to data from Terrorism experts Khorasan refers to a historical region in Central Asia that, in addition to Afghanistan, also included Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.