LAGOS, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA)- French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday said France has information that Islamic State militants carried out Friday’s attack in a Moscow concert hall, warning Russia against exploiting the attack by blaming it on Ukraine.
France has intelligence that “it was an entity of Islamic State that planned the attack and carried it out,” Macron told reporters after arriving on a trip to the French South American region of French Guiana.
Russia, which has challenged assertions by the United States that the Islamic State militant group orchestrated the mass shooting in Moscow, continued on Monday to suggest Ukraine was to blame. Macron said this was “cynical and counterproductive”.
“This attack was claimed by Islamic State,” Macron said, “and the information available to us, to our (intelligence) services as well as to our main partners, indicates indeed that it was an entity of the Islamic State which instigated and carried out this attack.
“This specific group … had over the past months carried out several (attack) attempts on our soil,” he added.
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Macron also said France had offered to increase cooperation with Russian intelligence services over the concert hall attack “so that we continue to fight effectively against these groups which are targeting several countries”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged on Monday that last week’s deadly attack was carried out by Islamic militants, but suggested it was also to the benefit of Ukraine and that Kyiv may have played a role.
“We know that the crime was carried out by the hand of radical Islamists with an ideology that the Muslim world has fought for centuries,” Putin said in remarks posted on the Telegram messaging app.
He did not directly mention Islamic State, and repeated his previous assertion that the assailants had been trying to flee to Ukraine, saying there were “many questions” to be examined.
“The question that arises is who benefits from this?” Putin said. “This atrocity may be just a link in a whole series of attempts by those who have been at war with our country since 2014 by the hands of the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime.”
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“We know by whose hand the crime against Russia and its people was committed. But what is of interest to us is who ordered it.”
Putin said the purpose of the attack was to “sow panic”. But as Russian forces were advancing through the Ukraine war theatre, he said, it could also be intended to “show their own population that not all is lost for the Kyiv regime”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy derided Putin’s comments in his nightly video address, saying that for the Kremlin leader “everyone is a terrorist, except himself, though he has been thriving on terror for two decades.”