Russian investigations chief tells Putin that the concert hall attack suspects named a mastermind (after being tortured)
The four men charged with carrying out Friday’s terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall have confessed to their crimes and provided details about the people who orchestrated and aided their actions, Federal Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin told Vladimir Putin during a teleconference on Monday. Over the weekend, videos circulated online showing Russian soldiers torturing the suspects by various means. When they appeared in court for arraignment on Sunday night, the four men were battered and bruised. (One was even in a wheelchair and unconscious.)
Bastrykin did not reveal whom the suspects identified as the attack’s mastermind, but he told the president that officials had captured three suspected accomplices who allegedly provided the assailants with an apartment, a vehicle, and cash.
Earlier, during the same teleconference, President Putin implied that the Ukrainian and U.S. governments bear responsibility for organizing or somehow inciting Friday’s terrorist attack, saying that “this atrocity could be just a single link in a whole chain of attempts by those who have been at war with our country since 2014, fighting through the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime.”