00:00 Four people have been charged with carrying out an attack at a Moscow concert hall this past Friday.
00:05 The death toll from that shooting spree, claimed by an affiliate of the Islamic State group,
00:10 has risen to 137. Russian officials have also detained seven people suspected of involvement
00:16 while attempting to tie the attack to Ukraine. For more on this story, we can go across to our
00:22 former Russia correspondent, Nick Holdsworth. Nick, good afternoon. Kyiv has denied any
00:28 involvement in this attack. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack,
00:32 yet Russian officials are leaving the door open for doubt. Why is that?
00:36 It's part of the general narrative connected to the war in Ukraine. In a way, this tragic
00:45 event on Friday night is an opportunity for the Kremlin to tie some blame to Ukraine, to whip up
00:52 more public support for perhaps an escalation in the war in Ukraine, and to very firmly pin
00:59 the blame somehow on the West. We have the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova writing an
01:06 article in a popular tabloid today, calling into question US assertions that Islamic State
01:13 was behind the attack. She reminds readers that Washington supported Mujahedin,
01:20 the Islamic Mujahedin in Afghanistan in the 1980s when Russia was trying to
01:26 fight a war against them. Basically, the narrative is trying to link somehow the West
01:34 and Ukraine to this attack in order to bolster what Putin sees as the necessary support of the
01:41 public in Russia for the war in Ukraine. Nick, we have been seeing images of these
01:47 men that have been charged with cuts on their faces, bruise being dragged,
01:52 reports of even one attacker having his ear cut off and his ear being kept in his mouth.
01:58 What's the state of these suspects and why is Russia showing all of this?
02:04 Well, clearly from the footage we've seen of the suspects being taken into court yesterday and
02:11 charged with terrorism offences, they've all been badly beaten. It seems fairly clear that
02:19 they weren't in that state when they left Crocus City Hall on Friday evening and when they were
02:28 arrested. There's video footage on multiple sites on the Russian social media showing security
02:36 forces beating those men. In one case, we see a man in paramilitary garb leaning over and cutting
02:44 the ear off one of the suspects and then trying to force it into his mouth. Now, some sites on
02:52 Russian social media have said that that man was wearing a uniform with insignia that connected
02:58 him to neo-Nazi groups, which is intriguing given that the Kremlin's narrative about Ukraine is that
03:03 it's the Ukrainians who are the neo-Nazis. So it's fairly clear that they've all been badly beaten
03:09 and as to why these videos have been leaked from the security services to pro-war bloggers,
03:15 that's an open question but it does seem tied into trying to drum up some kind of public emotion
03:21 about what happened on Friday night. Now, it's interesting that Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin
03:27 spokesman, refused to answer a question about the condition of the men when he was asked about that
03:32 in a briefing today.
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