At least 40 people were killed and over 100 injured when gunmen in camouflage opened fire with automatic weapons on people at a concert in the Crocus City Hall near Moscow on Friday, Russia’s FSB security service said.
In one of the worst such attacks in Russia in years, at least five gunmen were shown in unverified videos firing repeatedly at screaming civilians in the concert hall as Soviet-era rock group „Picnik” was about to perform.
Other video footage showed the men shooting people below what looked like an entrance sign to „Crocus City Hall”. There were also images of people lying motionless in pools of blood outside the hall.
All the tickets in the 6,200-seat concert hall had been sold out. State news agency TASS cited Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), as saying 40 people had been killed and more than 100 hurt.
Earlier this month, the United States and other western countries had issued terror warnings and told their citizens not to join public gatherings in Russia. On 8 March, the embassy wrote it was “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours.”
The shooting at the concert hall was reminiscent of the attack on the Bataclan in Paris in November 2015. In a terrorist attack in Moscow in 2002, gunmen took hostages at a theater in one of the worst incidents in the country’s history.
Russia’s last major terrorist attack was in 2017, when 14 people were killed in a blast on the Saint Petersburg subway.
