Russia arrests four more Moscow attack plotters

A Russian police officers with a dog secures the area outside the Crocus City Hall in Moscow's northern suburb of Krasnogorsk on March 29, 2024, a week after a deadly attack by gunmen on a Moscow concert hall killed at least 143 people and wounded dozens more. (Photo by NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA / AFP)

Russia’s FSB security service has said that four people arrested on Sunday in a thwarted “terror” plot had supplied funding and weapons for the deadly attack on a Moscow concert hall last month.

More than 140 people were killed when gunmen stormed the Crocus City Hall venue on March 22 before setting the building on fire in the most fatal attack in Russia for two decades.

The FSB said in a statement on Monday that it had arrested a group of four a day earlier in the southern Dagestan region who “were directly involved in the financing and supply of terrorist means to the perpetrators of the terrorist act carried out on 22 March in the Crocus City Hall in Moscow.”

On Sunday, Russia’s national anti-terrorism committee said it had apprehended three people who were “planning to commit a series of terrorist crimes.”

The FSB said Monday that four foreign citizens had been arrested in the operation in the regional capital Makhachkala and the nearby town of Kaspiysk.

The Interfax news agency cited an FSB video showing one of the detained men saying: “I took weapons to them, these guys who attacked Crocus City Hall. I took them weapons from Makhachkala.”

Russian authorities had previously announced the arrests of 12 people they say are connected to the attack, including the four suspected gunmen, who have been identified as Tajik citizens.