March 24 Moscow concert hall attack

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has offered his condolences to Russian President Vladimir Putin following the deadly concert attack in Moscow, state media Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Sunday.

North Korea opposes “all sorts of terrorism and nothing can justify the heinous terrorism threatening human life,” Kim said in the KCNA report. “Our people regard the misfortune and sorrow of the friendly Russian people as their own pain.”

ISIS-affiliated news agency Amaq released a graphic video on Saturday that purports to show Friday’s attack at a concert hall in suburban Moscow recorded by one of the attackers, suggesting the perpetrators had a direct link to ISIS in order to be able to send the video.

CNN has geolocated it to the concert hall and notes that its identifying metadata has been erased.

The video, which is about 90 seconds long, shows four attackers with their faces blurred and voices distorted in what appears to be the Crocus City Hall complex.

The video shows one attacker signaling to another gunman, who then walks past a door where people are hiding and opens fire on them.

Bodies and blood can be seen on the floor, with fire raging at a distance.

The video also shows one of the attackers slitting the throat of a man lying on his back.

The video ends with the four attackers walking away inside the building as smoke can be seen at a distance.

On Friday, ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a short statement published by Amaq.

On Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested Ukraine was behind the attack, stating the perpetrators had “tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the border.”

Ukraine has vehemently denied any connection to Friday's attack.

US Vice President Kamala Harris and the White House National Security Council said there is no evidence that Ukraine is behind the attack at a concert hall near Moscow.

“There is no, whatsoever, any evidence — and in fact, what we know to be the case is that ISIS-K is actually, by all accounts, responsible for what happened,” Harris said in an interview with ABC News. “What has happened is an act of terrorism and the number of people who've been killed is obviously a tragedy and we should all send our condolences to those families."

National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said "miserable" Russian President Vladimir Putin waited overnight before publicly addressing Russians, only to accuse Ukraine of having a hand in the terror attack at a concert hall near Moscow.

On Saturday, Putin told the Russian people that the perpetrators of the Crocus City Hall attack had “tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the border.”

Zelensky and several Ukrainian officials have vehemently denied Ukraine has any kind of involvement in the attack.

In his nightly address, Zelensky also said that Russians "have come to Ukraine, burn our cities – and try to blame Ukraine."

Zelensky added that if the Russian people do "not ask any questions to their security and intelligence agencies, then Putin will try to turn such a situation to his personal advantage again."

More background: The terror group ISIS claimed responsibility for Russia's attack, according to a short statement published by ISIS-affiliated news agency Amaq on Telegram Friday. ISIS has not provided evidence to support the claim.

Earlier this week, Putin had dismissed warnings by the US embassy that there could be terrorist attacks on large groups, telling the Federal Security Service (FSB) that the embassy warnings were "provocative" and "outright blackmail."

Four suspects in Friday's terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall were detained in the Bryansk region and taken to Moscow, where they are now in the custody of Russia's Investigative Committee, Russian state media TASS reported Saturday.

The suspects were brought in two prisoner transport vehicles, which are still in the courtyard of the committee, a TASS correspondent reported. This indicates that the suspects are being interrogated and the investigation is ongoing, according to TASS.

In the coming days, investigators are expected to file a court motion asking for imprisonment as the chosen preventative measure. All four suspects face life imprisonment, TASS reports.

Gunmen in an entertainment venue. Bodies lying on the cold concrete. Horror that such murder could strike the safety of the Moscow bubble.

These were all present in the horrific aftermath of Friday night’s savage attack outside Crocus City Hall just as they were almost 22 years ago when I was outside the Dubrovka Theatre, where Chechen gunmen took 800 hostages, and a standoff ended with a special forces raid.

While the theatre attacks of 2002 marked just one of many horrific low points in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Islamist extremism, last night showed that the brutal past has come back to haunt the Kremlin – if, indeed, it ever left.

Yet Putin faces the same sort of Islamist enemy as 2002, in a world transformed. If indeed ISIS-K – the militant group’s Afghan branch – were responsible, as their claim and advance warnings from US officials suggest, it means a new generation of extremists have Russia in their sights, following Russia’s bloody suppression of Islamism in the south.

Read the full story here.

Anastasia Rodionova, a survivor of the Moscow region's Crocus City Hall attack, told Reuters Saturday that the armed assailants were "gunning down everyone methodically in silence" inside the venue on Friday night.

"It is unbelievable. You understand only now that you are lucky, really lucky. I came home; my coat was just covered in blood,” she added.

Another survivor of the attack, Margarita, who did not provide her last name, told Reuters that “the gunshots were going on and on.”

“We went down to some kind of ground floor, some dark room, and I saw only 'exit' word shining in the darkness, and we just did not know whether to run or not. Who is there in the dark? What is there in the dark?” she said.

Defense Intelligence of Ukraine spokesperson Andrii Yusov firmly denied his country had anything to do with the terror attacks at a concert hall in Russia's Moscow region.

Earlier Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin told the Russian people that the perpetrators had “tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the border." A handful of Russian officials have suggested without evidence that Ukraine may have been involved in the attack as well.

Yusov called Putin's comments "completely false and absurd."

He said that Russia had disregarded warnings, such as those from the US Embassy under its "duty to warn" policy, that terrorist attacks could be possible in large crowds. Putin had told Russia's Federal Security Service on Tuesday that warnings from the US were "provocative" and "outright blackmail."

Leaders around the world have expressed their condolences and condemnation of the terror attack that took place on the Crocus City complex near Moscow on Friday night.