State Champ Radio Mass Shooting
Calls mounted in Russia on Monday to harshly punish those behind the concert hall attack that killed more than 130 people as authorities combed the burned-out ruins of the entertainment complex and an Orthodox priest blessed the site.
Four men, charged with carrying out a terrorist attack, appeared in court Sunday night and showed signs of being severely beaten. Civil liberties groups cited this as sign that Russia’s poor record on human rights under President Vladimir Putin was bound to worsen.
Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said the investigation is still ongoing but vowed that “the perpetrators will be punished, they do not deserve mercy.”
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Former President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, urged authorities to “kill them all.”
The attack Friday night on Crocus City Hall on the western outskirts of Moscow left 137 people dead and over 180 injured, proving to be the deadliest in Russia in years. A total of 97 people remained hospitalized, officials said.
As they mowed down concertgoers with gunfire, the attackers set fire to the vast concert hall, and the resulting blaze caused the roof to collapse.
The search operation will continue until at least Tuesday afternoon, officials said. A Russian Orthodox priest conducted a service at the site Monday, blessing a makeshift memorial with incense.
An affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack, and U.S. intelligence backed up their claims. French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking on a trip to French Guiana, said France has intelligence pointing to “an IS entity” as responsible for the Moscow attack.
But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to assign blame, urging reporters Monday to wait for the results of the investigation in Russia. He also refused to comment on reports that the U.S. warned authorities in Moscow on March 7 about a possible terrorist attack, saying any such intelligence is confidential.
The four suspects were identified in the Russian media as Tajik nationals. At least two of the suspects admitted culpability, court officials said, although their conditions raised questions about whether their statements were coerced.
The men were identified as Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, 32; Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, 30; Shamsidin Fariduni, 25; and Mukhammadsobir Faizov, 19. The charges carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Russia’s Federal Security Service said seven other suspects have been detained. Three of them appeared in court Monday, with no signs of injuries, and they were placed in pre-trial detention on terrorism charges. The fate of others remained unclear.
Russian media had reported the four were tortured during interrogation. Mirzoyev, Rachabalizoda and Fariduni showed signs of heavy bruising, including swollen faces. Mirzoyev had a plastic bag still hanging over his neck; Rachabalizoda had a heavily bandaged ear. Russian media reported Saturday that one suspect had his ear cut off during interrogation. The Associated Press couldn’t verify the report or videos purporting to show this.
Faizov, wearing a hospital gown, appeared in court in a wheelchair, accompanied by medical personnel, and sat with his eyes closed throughout. He appeared to have multiple cuts.
Peskov refused to comment on the suspects’ treatment.
Medvedev, Russia’s president in 2008-12, had especially harsh comments about them.
“They have been caught. Kudos to all who were chasing them. Should they be killed? They should. And it will happen,” he wrote on his Telegram page. “But it is more important to kill everyone involved. Everyone. Those who paid, those who sympathized, those who helped. Kill them all.”
Margarita Simonyan, head of the state-funded television channel RT, shared photos of the four men’s bruised and swollen faces on X, formerly Twitter.
She said that even the death penalty — currently banned in Russia — would be “too easy” a punishment.
Instead, she said they should face “lifelong hard labor somewhere underground, living there too, without the opportunity to ever see light, on bread and water, with a ban on conversations and with a not very humane escort.”
Russian human rights advocates condemned the violence against the men.
Team Against Torture, a prominent group that advocates against police brutality, said in a statement that the culprits must face stern punishment, but “savagery should not be the answer to savagery.”
It said the value of any testimony obtained by torture was “critically low,” and “if the government allows for torture of terrorism suspects, it may allow unlawful violence toward other citizens, too.”
Net Freedoms, another Russian group that focuses on freedom of speech cases, said Medvedev’s remarks, as well as Putin’s recent call on security services to “punish traitors without a statute of limitation no matter where they are,” made against the backdrop of “demonstrative torture of the detained … effectively authorize extrajudicial killings and give instructions to security forces on how to treat enemies.”
“We’re seeing the possible beginning of the new Great Terror,” Net Freedoms said, referring to mass repressions by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The group foresees more police brutality against suspects in terrorist-related cases and a spike in violent crimes against migrants.
Abuse of suspects by law enforcement and security services isn’t new, said Sergei Davidis of the Memorial human rights group.
“We know about torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war, we know about mass torture of those charged with terrorism, high treason and other crimes, especially those investigated by the Federal Security Service. Here, it was for the first time made public,” Davidis said.
Parading beaten suspects could reflect a desire by authorities to show a muscular response to try to defuse any criticism of their inability to prevent the attack, he said.
It was a major embarrassment for Putin and came less than a week after he cemented his grip on Russia for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since Soviet times.
Many on Russian social media questioned how authorities and their vast security apparatus that actively surveils, pressures and prosecutes critics failed to prevent the attack despite the U.S. warning.
Citing the treatment of the suspects, Davidis told AP that “we can suppose it was deliberately made public in order to show the severity of response of the state.”
“People are not satisfied with this situation when such a huge number of law enforcement officers didn’t manage to prevent such an attack, and they demonstrate the severe reaction in order to stop these accusations against them,” he said.
The fact that the security forces did not conceal their methods was “a bad sign,” he said.
IS, which fought Russian forces that intervened in the Syrian civil war, has long targeted the country. In a statement posted by the group’s Aamaq news agency, the IS Afghanistan affiliate said it carried out an attack in Krasnogorsk, the suburb of Moscow where the concert hall is located.
In October 2015, a bomb planted by IS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people aboard, most of them Russian vacationers returning from Egypt.
The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, has claimed responsibility for several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
This story was originally published by Associated Press.
Russia observed a national day of mourning on Sunday (March 24) for the victims killed in an attack at a suburban Moscow concert hall. Russia’s Investigative Committee said on Sunday that 137 bodies had been recovered from the Crocus City Hall, where the mass shooting took place on Friday, The New York Times reports. “The […]
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Tragedy struck the Super Bowl celebration parade of the Kansas City Chiefs after a shooting left one person dead and multiple injured victims.
On Wednesday (February 14), fans of the Kansas City Chiefs had assembled outside of Union Station, the 19th-century rail depot-turned-shopping center and science hall located in the downtown area after the parade honoring the team’s Super Bowl LVIII win in Las Vegas. According to police reports, shots were fired on the west side of Union Station at 2 P.M. sending the gathered crowd of nearly a million people fleeing. When police regained control, one person was pronounced dead and twenty victims were rushed to the area hospitals. Eleven children were among those shot. The deceased victim was later identified as Lisa Lopez-Galvan, a radio DJ with the local station KFFI who was the host of the popular “Taste of Tejano” program.
The police are still conducting investigations into what sparked the shooting. Kansas” City Police Chief Stacey Graves confirmed that they had people in custody, referencing social media videos of Chiefs fans tackling someone. “I do want to comment on the question that I got earlier about a video of some fans tackling someone. We do have three persons detained and under investigation for today’s incident. We are working to determine if one of the three are the one that was in that video where fans assisted police,” she told the press. The FBI has also set up a website where people can share videos from the incident with investigators.
In the aforementioned press conference, Kansas City Mayor Quentin Lucas confirmed that he was at Union Station with his wife and mother when he heard the gunfire. “When you have people who decide to bring guns to events, when you have people who are deciding to try to mar events — celebratory ones, like this one — all of us start to become members of this club that none of us want to be a part of,” he said. Players from the Chiefs expressed their grief, with star quarterback Patrick Mahomes writing on X that he was “Praying for Kansas City”, and tight end Travis Kelce writing that he was “heartbroken” over the shooting in his post on the platform.
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A mass shooting event in Maine took place on Wednesday night (October 25), leaving 18 dead and 13 others injured. A massive manhunt has been launched to locate Robert Card, the chief suspect in the shooting.
Maine news outlet WMTW reports that the suspect Robert Card, 40, carried out the shooting in the town of Lewiston, which is 36 miles northeast of Portland and 29 miles southwest of Augusta, the state’s capital.
Gov. Janet Mills made a public statement regarding the tragedy.
“I’m profoundly saddened to stand before you today and report that 18 people lost their lives. Thirteen people were injured in last night’s attacks,” Mills shared.
The shootings took place at the Spare Time/Just-In-Time Recreation Bowling Alley and Schemengees Bar in Lewiston. Of the 18 victims, seven people died at the bowling alley and eight people died at the bar. Three individuals ended up succumbing to their wounds on the way to receive treatment at a local hospital.
An arrest warrant is out for Card, who Army officials confirmed has been a member of the Army Reserve since 2002. In response to the shooting, schools in Portland are closed today as are city buildings. Shelter-in-place orders have been enacted in the cities of Lewiston, Lisbon, and Bowdoin.
A U.S. defense official shared that on July 17, the Army Reserve’s 3rd Battalion, 304th Infantry Regiment leadership informed the authorities at the Camp Smith Training Site in New York that Card displayed behavior that raised some questions.
Officials suggested that law enforcement officials be informed of Card’s behavior. Card was taken to the Keller Army Community Hospital at the United States Military Academy by the New York State Police for evaluation.
Robert Card is thought to be armed and dangerous.
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The suspect in a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs gay nightclub is expected to strike a plea deal to state murder and hate charges that would ensure at least a life sentence for the attack that killed five people and wounded 17, several survivors told The Associated Press.
Word of a possible legal resolution of last year’s Club Q massacre follows a series of jailhouse phone calls from the suspect to the AP expressing remorse and the intention to face the consequences at the next scheduled court hearing this month.
“I have to take responsibility for what happened,” 23-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich said in their first public comments about the case.
Federal and state authorities and defense attorneys declined to comment on a possible plea deal. But Colorado law requires victims to be notified of such deals, and several people who lost loved ones or were wounded in the attack told the AP that state prosecutors have given them advance word that Aldrich will plead guilty to charges that would ensure the maximum state sentence of life behind bars.
Prosecutors also recently asked survivors to prepare for the June 26 hearing by writing victim-impact statements and steeling themselves emotionally for the possible release of the Club Q surveillance video of the attack.
“Someone’s gone that can never be brought back through the justice system,” said Wyatt Kent, who was celebrating his 23rd birthday in Club Q when Aldrich opened fire, gunning down Kent’s partner, Daniel Aston, who was working behind the bar. “We are all still missing a lot, a partner, a son, a daughter, a best friend.”
Jonathan Pullen, the suspect’s step-grandfather who plans to watch the upcoming hearing on a livestream, said Aldrich “has to realize what happened on that terrible night. It’s truly beginning to dawn on him.”
Aldrich faces more than 300 state counts, including murder and hate crimes. And the U.S. Justice Department is considering filing federal hate crime charges, according to a senior law enforcement official familiar with the matter who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing case. It’s unclear whether the anticipated resolution to the state prosecution will also resolve the ongoing FBI investigation.
Some survivors who listened to the suspect’s recorded comments to the AP lambasted them as a calculated attempt to avoid the federal death penalty, noting they stopped short of discussing a motive, put much of the blame on drugs and characterized the crime in passive, generalities such as “I just can’t believe what happened” and “I wish I could turn back time.” Such language, they said, belied by the maps, diagrams, online rants and other evidence that showed months of plotting and premeditation.
“No one has sympathy for him,” said Michael Anderson, who was bartending at Club Q when the shooting broke out and ducked as several patrons were gunned down around him. “This community has to live with what happened, with collective trauma, with PTSD, trying to grieve the loss of our friends, to move past emotional wounds and move past what we heard, saw and smelled.”
Terror erupted just before midnight on Nov. 19 when the suspect walked into Club Q, a longtime sanctuary for the LGBTQ community in this mostly conservative city of 480,000, and fired an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle indiscriminately. Disbelief gave way to screaming and confusion as the music continued to play. Partygoers dove across a bloody dance floor for cover. Friends frantically tried to protect each other and plugged wounds with napkins.
The killing only stopped after a Navy petty officer grabbed the barrel of the suspect’s rifle, burning his hand because it was so hot. An Army veteran joined in to help subdue and beat Aldrich until police arrived, finding the shooter had emptied one high-capacity magazine and was armed with several more.
Aldrich, who since their arrest has identified as nonbinary and uses the pronouns they and them, allegedly visited Club Q at least six times in the years before the attack. District Attorney Michael Allen told a judge that the suspect’s mother made Aldrich go to the club “against his will and sort of forced that culture on him.”
Allen also has said the suspect administered a website that posted a “neo-Nazi white supremacist” shooting training video. Online gaming friends said Aldrich expressed hatred for the police, LGBTQ people and minorities and used anti-Black and anti-gay slurs. And a police detective testified that Aldrich sent an online message with a photo of a rifle scope trained on a gay pride parade.
Defense attorneys in previous hearings have not disputed Aldrich’s role in the shooting but have pushed back against allegations it was motivated by hate, arguing the suspect was drugged up on cocaine and medication the night of the attack.
“I don’t know if this is common knowledge but I was on a very large plethora of drugs,” Aldrich told the AP. “I had been up for days. I was abusing steroids. … I’ve finally been able to get off that crap I was on.”
Aldrich didn’t answer directly when asked whether the attack was motivated by hate, saying only that’s “completely off base.”
Even a former friend of Aldrich found their remarks to be disingenuous. “I’m really glad he’s trying to take accountability but it’s like the ‘why’ is being shoved under the rug,” said Xavier Kraus, who lived across the hall from Aldrich at a Colorado Springs apartment complex.
The AP sent Aldrich a handwritten letter several months ago asking them to discuss a 2021 kidnapping arrest following a standoff with a SWAT team, a prosecution that had been dismissed and sealed despite video evidence of Aldrich’s crimes. In that case, just months before the Club Q shooting, they threatened to become “the next mass killer” and stockpiled guns, ammo, body armor and a homemade bomb. The incident was livestreamed on Facebook and prompted the evacuation of 10 nearby homes as authorities discovered a tub with more than 100 pounds of explosive materials.
The alleged shooter, who lived with their grandparents at the time and was upset about their plans to move to Florida, threatened to kill the couple and “go out in a blaze,” authorities said. “You guys die today and I’m taking you with me,” they quoted the suspect as saying. “I’m loaded and ready.”
The charges were dismissed even after relatives wrote a judge warning that Aldrich was “certain” to commit murder if freed. District Attorney Allen, facing heavy criticism, later attributed the dismissal of the case to Aldrich’s family members refusing to cooperate and repeatedly dodging out-of-state subpoenas.
In response to AP’s letter, Aldrich first phoned a reporter in March and asked to be paid for an interview, a request that was declined. They called back late last month, days after prosecutors wrote in a court filing that there was “near-unanimous sentiment” among the victims for “the most expedient determination of case-related issues.”
In a series of six calls, each limited by an automated jail phone system to 15 minutes, the suspect said: “Nothing’s ever going to bring back their loved ones. People are going to have to live with injury that can’t be repaired.”
Asked why it happened, they said, “I don’t know. That’s why I think it’s so hard to comprehend that it did happen. … I’m either going to get the death penalty federally or I will go to prison for life, that’s a given.”
While the AP normally would not provide a platform to someone alleged to have committed such a crime, editors judged that the suspect’s stated intent to accept responsibility and expression of remorse were newsworthy and should be reported.
Former Club Q bartender Anderson was among survivors who told prosecutors they wanted a fast resolution of the criminal case.
“My fear is that if this takes years, that prevents the processing and moving on and finding peace beyond this case,” he said. “I would love this wrapped up as quickly as possible under the guarantee that justice is served.”
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