Putin says Ukraine's 'role in terrorist attack'

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has said that the alleged suspects in the terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall shopping centre near Moscow wanted to flee to Ukraine. This is stated in a statement of the dictator.

According to him, for them on the border allegedly "prepared a window" for them to cross."

The head of the Kremlin said that security forces allegedly detained 11 people, four of them - the direct perpetrators.

All four direct perpetrators of the terrorist attack, all those who shot, killed people, have been found and detained. They tried to escape and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them from the Ukrainian side to cross the state border," the dictator said.

Putin also called the attack on Crocus a "bloody, barbaric terrorist attack" whose victims were "dozens of peaceful, innocent people - our compatriots, including children, teenagers, women." He said Russian security services were working to identify terrorist accomplices.

It is already obvious that we have encountered not just a cynical, carefully planned terrorist attack, but a prepared and organised mass murder of peaceful, defenceless people. The criminals were cold-bloodedly and purposefully going about killing, shooting our citizens and our children at point-blank range. Like the Nazis who once carried out massacres in the occupied territories, they planned to organise a show execution, a bloody act of intimidation. All the perpetrators, organisers and customers of this crime will be justly and inevitably punished. Whoever they are. Whoever directed them. I repeat: we will identify and punish everyone who stood behind the terrorists, who prepared this atrocity, this blow to Russia, to our people," he said.

Meanwhile, the number of dead in the terrorist attack in "Crocus City Hall" reached 133 people, reports the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation.

We will remind, in the evening of 22 March in the Moscow region unknown persons arranged shooting in the concert hall "Crocus", and then set fire to the building.