Saturday, March 23, 2024

‘I Have No Doubt Moscow Terror Act Was Provoked by Ukraine’: Elite Russian Counter-Terrorism Veteran


Moscow Crocus City Hall Attack: What’s Known So Far?
Sputnik


The incident came on Friday evening, when at least four gunners burst into a concert venue in Krasnogorsk, Moscow region, opening fire and throwing grenades or incendiary bombs and setting the building ablaze.
The number of those killed in the March 22 terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall concert venue in the Moscow Region has risen to 143, including three children, with 107 more taken to hospital.
The death toll from the attack is expected to increase further, the Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement on Saturday.

Preliminary data has shown that the causes of deaths are gunshot wounds and poisoning by combustion products, according to the statement.
This comes as Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said that after the Crocus City Hall attack, "the criminals intended to cross the Russian-Ukrainian border and had relevant contacts on the Ukrainian side of the border."

The attack was thoroughly planned and the perpetrators had weapons prepared in advance in a cache, the FSB noted, adding that work is underway to determine all the circumstances of the incident.
Earlier in the day, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov reported the arrest of 11 suspects in connection with the attack to Russian President Vladimir Putin, including all four directly involved in it. The suspects were detained in the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine, according to the FSB.

In a separate development, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that over the past ten years, “Western liberal regimes have turned Ukraine into a center for spreading terrorism,” where "those involved in the Crocus City Hall attack tried to find a shelter.”

Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Sputnik's parent media group Rossiya Segodnya, wrote on her Telegram channel that a man detained on suspicion of being involved in the Crocus City Hall attack admitted to shooting innocent people for money.
The suspected terrorist claimed that although curators promised to pay him 500,000 rubles ($5,418), he allegedly received just half of the sum, according to Simonyan.



Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russian Alpha anti-terrorism unit, says he has no doubt in his mind that Russian investigators will ultimately find the masterminds behind Friday’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall, and has an inkling about the man most directly responsible.

“There is only one way to qualify what happened – this was a terrorist act, meaning innocent people were harmed. They were simply executed,” Sergei Goncharov, president of the International Association of Alpha Veterans – an elite Russian anti-terrorism special ops force subordinated to the FSB, told Sputnik.
“What happened today was a terrible tragedy, and I think, a link in a chain. Therefore I think Ukraine will reject responsibility. Because nobody publicly approves of terrorist attacks. But in any case, at the moment I don’t see any factor that could take us away from the Ukrainian connection. It could have been some other organization, but I have no doubt that it was provoked by the Nazis of Ukraine,” the retired Alpha captain said.
Specifically, Goncharov believes Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov* – who has threatened repeatedly to target Russian civilians, is most directly responsible for Friday’s carnage.
The terror threat emanating from the Kiev regime is real, Goncharov emphasized, pointing to almost daily reports by the FSB of operations to capture terrorists, arsonists, would-be suicide bombers, etc.



Ukraine and the West have resorted to false flag operations to persuade everyone that ISIS* was behind the terror attack in the Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow, said Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Sputnik's parent media group Rossiya Segodnya. 
The head of the media group stressed that the names and faces of the perpetrators are already known to authorities and that the terrorists gave everything away during interrogation.
“It immediately became obvious why US media were claiming in unison that it was ISIS," she said.

Simonyan explained that the perpetrators were chosen to carry out the attack in a manner that would allow the West to persuade the international community that ISIS was behind the attack.

She added that the enthusiasm displayed by Western media when they tried to persuade everyone that ISIS was responsible even before arrests were made gave them away completely.

“This is not ISIS. This is a well-coordinated team of several other, also widely known, abbreviations," Simonyan concluded.

In the hours following the attack, Western media insisted that radical jihadist organization ISIS was behind it, while Ukrainian officials also said that they had nothing to do with the tragedy.






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