‘Kill them and have no mercy’, say Moscow gunmen in concert massacre video

Islamic State gunmen who killed more than 130 people in a Moscow concert hall on Friday encouraged each other to show “no mercy” at the scene of the attack, video footage reveals.

The bodycam footage, captured by one of the six gunmen, shows the attackers walking towards the Crocus City Hall music venue with automatic guns.

“Bring the machine gun. Kill them and have no mercy,” one of the attackers is heard saying. Another says: “The infidels will be defeated, God willing. God is great.”

The video, which is too graphic to publish, gives the first close-up view of the attack on Friday night.

It shows one of the attackers firing at least 10 shots into a group of people at the entrance of the concert hall. Another attacker then slits the throats of injured people lying on the floor.

The attack was the deadliest in Russia by Islamist terrorists in 20 years and has shocked the country. 

Sunday was declared an official day of mourning in the Moscow region, with shops, businesses and restaurants ordered to close. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said Vladimir Putin lit a candle in the chapel of his residence outside Moscow. 

Bomb scares were reported on Sunday in a St Petersburg shopping mall and at a Moscow airport.

Russian security forces captured four of the Islamic State attackers on Saturday as they tried to escape in a car southwest of Moscow. Two others have been killed.

All four of the captured alleged attackers are Tajik nationals and a video showed them confessing to the shootings while being held in stress positions.

On Sunday, Grey Zone, a Telegram channel linked to the Russian security services, published a photo of one of the captured men being tortured. In the photo, the man lies on the wooden floor of a gym with his arms bound behind his back and his trousers around his knees.

Electric wires hooked up to a military field phone appear to have been attached to his testicles. His face is contorted in pain.

Grey Zone described this as a “standard interrogation” technique and said: “One of the detained migrant terrorists from Tajikistan began to lose consciousness from excitement, so he was connected to a ‘charger’.” 

Video also showed at least two of the men being taken to the office of the Russian Investigative Committee’s headquarters in Moscow for interrogation. In the video, they were blindfolded and marched into the building in stress positions.

Emomali Rahmon, president of Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic, condemned the attack in a phone call on Sunday with Vladimir Putin and appeared to disown the alleged attackers. “Terrorists have no nationality, no homeland and no religion,” he said. 

On Saturday, Tajikistan’s foreign ministry had said reports that its citizens were involved were “fake”.

Tajiks form a large part of the migrant workforce in Russia. Reports from rights activists in Russia said that police have started intensifying searches of Central Asians living and working in Russia.

Although Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, the Kremlin and its propagandists have linked it to Ukraine. Ukraine has denied any links and the US has said that it passed intelligence to Russia of the Islamist group’s attack plans.

Western analysts have said that the Kremlin wants to shift blame for the attack and also to use it as a recruitment tool for its war in Ukraine.

On Sunday, Russia’s top newspapers continued to push a link between the attack and Ukraine.

“What do the videos of the interrogations of the Crocus terrorists say? The trail leads to Ukraine,” the top-selling Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper said in a headline.