The Kremlin said on Tuesday said that a probe into the Moscow concert hall attack that killed 139 people on Friday was continuing, and that those “gloating” about the bloodshed were “scumbags”. “We know that the crime was committed by the hands of radical Islamists,” Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said during a meeting with government officials late on Monday. “We are interested in who ordered it,” he said, adding that the shooting fit in to a wider campaign of intimidation by Ukraine.
“This atrocity may be just one part in a whole series of attempts by those who have been at war with our country since 2014 by the hands of the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime.” Putin didn’t mention the affiliate of the Islamic State group that claimed responsibility for the attack, despite growing evidence that the Afghan branch of IS, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province , masterminded the attack.