Concert hall attack was Isis not Ukraine, admits Russian spy chief

A top Russian official has admitted for the first time that Islamic State was behind a brutal attack on a concert hall in Moscow this year, having blamed Ukraine in its immediate aftermath.

Men with machineguns killed 145 people and wounded hundreds more in a rampage at Crocus City Hall, which was packed with concertgoers on a Friday night in March, before setting the building on fire.

Eleven Tajik citizens and a Kyrgyzstan-born Russian have been arrested in connection with the massacre including four gunmen.

An Isis offshoot in Afghanistan known as Islamic State-Khorasan, or Isis-K, claimed responsibility for the deadliest terrorist act in Russia in two decades.

On Friday, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s domestic intelligence agency FSB, became the first senior Russian official to admit that the attack was masterminded by Isis’s Afghan branch and not by the Ukrainian intelligence services, as had been previously suggested by President Putin.

“We know for certain that the men who recruited the attackers are members of Islamic State- Khorasan who have been deliberately targeting the Tajik diaspora in Russia via the internet from Afghanistan,” Bortnikov told a meeting of intelligence chiefs of former Soviet nations in Moscow.

The marginalised Tajik community in Russia, who typically do menial, underpaid work, have faced more violence and discrimination since the gunmen were identified as Tajik migrant workers.

• Putin offers to drop criminal charges if suspects fight in Ukraine

Bortnikov also warned that migrant workers from central Asia were prone to radicalisation “both by terrorist recruiters and foreign intelligence agencies”.

However, he made no mention of any potential Ukrainian role in the attack that the Kremlin had been speculating about. In the aftermath of the shooting Bortnikov insisted on “Ukrainian involvement” as he claimed “Islamists alone could not have plotted such an attack”.

Putin never confirmed the overwhelming evidence of Isis’s role, insisting that Russia “cannot possibly be targeted by terrorist attacks of Islamic fundamentalists” because it was friendly to Muslim nations “on the international arena”.