At least 115 people, including three children, were killed in Friday's terrorist attack on an event centre near Moscow, authorities said on Saturday as the first arrests of suspected perpetrators were made.
The figure jumped from morning reports of 93 fatalities. While clearing away the rubble in the Crocus City Hall's concert area, emergency services found more bodies, the Moscow Investigative Committee wrote on Telegram.
Several people died in hospital from their injuries, including the three children, according to the Moscow region health ministry. As hospitals also took in scores of injured, authorities called on people to donate blood and set up several centres for this purpose.
Shortly before the start of a concert on Friday evening, unidentified men wearing camouflage clothing stormed the centre in the north-western suburb of Krasnogorsk and opened fire on the crowd, the Prosecutor General's Office said.
Perpetrators shot indiscriminately at visitors, eyewitnesses said. There were also explosions in the building and a major fire that collapsed the roof.
The extremist militia Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, the IS mouthpiece Amaq Agency reported, citing unnamed sources and a statement.
It said: "Islamic State fighters attacked a large gathering of Christians in the town of Krasnogorsk on the outskirts of the Russian capital Moscow, killing and wounding hundreds and causing great destruction."
Russian authorities did not initially comment on the claim.
The FSB domestic intelligence service told the news agency TASS that 11 people were arrested after the attack. At least four are believed to have been directly involved, FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov said.
Also on Saturday, Russian lawmaker Alexander Khinshtein wrote on Telegram that two men had been arrested travelling with weapons in a getaway vehicle in the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine.
Other suspects were being searched for in a nearby forest, the politician from the Kremlin's United Russia party added.
Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, had on Friday emphatically denied any Ukrainian involvement in the attack.
In an initial reaction, the United States also warned against making any connection with Ukraine. According to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, "there's no indication" that Ukraine was involved in the "terrible" attack.
Speaking on national television, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said it was "rash" of the US to exonerate Ukraine without providing supporting information to Russia.
At the beginning of March, intelligence services of the US and other Western countries had warned of an imminent terrorist attack in Russia. However, President Vladimir Putin dismissed this as a Western provocation aimed at destabilising the situation there.
Putin had been informed about Friday's events "from the very first minute," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Interfax agency. The president wished the injured a speedy recovery and thanked the doctors for their efforts, he said.
Messages of condolence also poured in from around the world, including from countries supporting Ukraine against Russia's invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.
"We condemn the terrible terrorist attack on innocent concert-goers in Moscow. Our thoughts are with the families of the victims and all those injured," German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday morning.
Afghanistan's Taliban government reacted to the claimed involvement of IS, describing it as a group "in the hands of intelligence agencies aimed at defaming Islam and posing a threat to the entire region."
A "coordinated, clear and resolute stance" by the countries in the region against terror is needed, Taliban foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi wrote on X.
The victims of the attack were said to be both employees and visitors to the concert hall, where the Russian rock band Piknik had been scheduled to perform.
The centre is one of the most popular event centres in the capital, hosting concerts, trade fairs and exhibitions.
The situation there was calm on Saturday morning as emergency services extinguished pockets of embers after the blaze and began clearing debris from the collapsed roof of the concert hall.
Police, the National Guard and the Investigative Committee recorded the damage and secured evidence. Weapons and ammunition, as well as CTV footage, were taken from the scene, Ria Novosti news agency reported.
The search for several suspected perpetrators, who were able to escape, also continued.
According to the lawmaker Khinshtein, the vehicle in Bryansk had failed to stop during a police chase on Friday evening, was shot at and then overturned.
"One terrorist was arrested on the spot, the others hid in the forest," he wrote, adding that a second suspect was arrested in the early morning.
A pistol and a Kalashnikov assault rifle as well as passports belonging to citizens of the Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan were found inside the vehicle, according to Khinshtein.
The head of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, Valentina Matviyenko, threatened the masterminds of the attack with retaliation.
"Those behind this terrible crime will receive the deserved and inevitable punishment," Matviyenko wrote on her Telegram channel.
As a consequence of the attack, all theatres, cinemas and museums in Moscow will remain closed this weekend.
Mayor Sergei Sobyanin had previously said that all major events in the capital and surrounding region had been cancelled.
