‘I noticed nothing strange’: suspect’s colleagues express shock at Moscow attack

Former colleagues and clients at the small barber shop where Muhammadsobir Fayzov once worked were stunned when they saw the news.

They knew the 19-year-old as a promising, hard-working stylist, and saw no signs that he and three other Tajik gunmen would be accused of committing last Friday’s bloodbath at a concert city hall in Moscow.

“He was regarded as a good barber … I noticed nothing strange about him,” said Yamina Safiyeva, the owner of the barber shop outside Moscow where Fayzov worked three months before the attack, which killed 139 people.

On Sunday, Fayzov was brought into a courtroom on a gurney, with a catheter attached and one eye injured or missing. He appeared to fade in an out of consciousness.

In the aftermath of Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in over two decades, limited details have emerged regarding the background of the alleged shooters.

All four men are Tajik citizens, apparently radicalised and recruited by Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).

The men were reportedly living in and around Moscow, part of the roughly 1.5 million Tajik migrants who left the poverty and unemployment of their home towns and villages in search of a better future in Russia.

The eldest defendant is Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, 32, who may have been living in Russia illegally. He was shown sitting in a glass cage in the courtroom with a black eye and bruised face.

Another alleged shooter, Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, 30, was apparently unemployed. Registered as a resident in Russia, he could not remember in what city, according to Russian news reports. When he appeared in court, his head was awkwardly bandaged after Russian officers reportedly sawed off one of his ears.

Shamsidin Fariduni, 25, appeared to have had the most stable life of the four suspects. He was registered in Krasnogorsk, the Moscow suburb where the killings took place, and worked in a flooring factory.

Gruesome videos and photographs circulating of their interrogations suggest that the men were tortured. Human rights experts have warned that any of their future statements or confessions could be notoriously untrustworthy.

It is yet unclear when and how exactly the men might have become radicalised and joined ISKP. The radical group, which was founded in 2015 by disaffected members of the Pakistani Taliban, has a long history of recruiting nationals from central Asia, including Tajikistan.

In Russia, the men would have faced the same challenging life as hundreds of thousands of central Asian migrants before them. Lured by salaries several times higher than at home and visa-free entrance, migrants from Tajikistan often live in cramped apartments and dorms, frequently sharing a grim room on the outskirts of Moscow with up to two dozen other workers.

Loathed by many in Russia – anti-migrant attitudes and racist sentiments have long been entrenched in society – migrants also face frequent police searches and arrests.

In one of such raids in January, footage showed police in Moscow forcing a group of Tajik workers to walk while squatting in a stressful position, an incident that caused anger in the Tajik community and led to protests from Tajik officials.

Radicalisation

A potent mix of xenophobia, poverty, and discrimination faced by Tajik men in Russia could have served as a fertile ground for recruitment by ISKP.

But their alleged radicalisation could have also happened back home in Tajikistan.

Although its nearly 10 million people are overwhelmingly Muslim, tensions connected to Islam are common in the impoverished central Asian nation.

Islamists were a key opponent during a 1992-97 civil war in which the government killed as many as 150,000 people and devastated the economy. When the war ended, the Tajik president, Emomali Rahmon, took steps to sharply curtail religious freedoms. These included bans on men wearing beards and the closure of hundreds of mosques. In 2017 alone, the beards of approximately 13,000 men were forcibly shaven, some of whom were later detained.

Observers have warned that some of these measures have had a counterproductive effect, with authorities radicalising far more of its citizens than it is reining in.

At least 1,000 Tajiks have become foreign fighters for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. In 2015, a senior Tajik police commander defected to IS, reappearing in a video dressed in black, brandishing a sniper rifle and vowing to bring jihad to Russia and the US.

In Moscow, early signs point to the fact that the Kremlin is unlikely to divert significant resourcing into tackling Islamic extremists, instead laying the groundwork for blaming Ukraine for the attack.

On Monday evening, Putin admitted the terrorist attack was conducted by radical Islamists but reasserted his earlier claims that Ukraine was probably somehow involved in the attack.

Nikolai Patrushev, the powerful secretary of Russia’s security council and a close ally of Putin, on Tuesday went a step further, saying that Ukraine was “of course” behind Friday’s attack on a Moscow concert hall. His words were echoed by the director of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, who said, without evidence, that he “believes” the US, Britain and Ukraine were behind the attack.

“Putin wants to focus on Ukraine, rather than Islamic terrorism,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert in Russian security services. “Possibly precisely because there are no easy answers to tackling central Asian extremism.”

Instead, in the days since the mass killing at the Crocus City concert hall near Moscow, innocent Tajik migrants across Russia have been subjected to threats, verbal abuse and discrimination.

“A handful of individuals has brought shame on an entire people. Now they look at us like we’re cursed,” one Tajik migrant told the Eurasianet outlet. “There is no sense of safety when you walk around the city.”

Final days

The exact movements of the four suspects before the attack remain murky.

Two of the suspects visited Crocus City Hall in the weeks prior to the attack, according to Shot, a Telegram channel close with links the Russia’s security services. Shot also published an image of a man resembling Fariduni, one of the suspects, at the concert hall two weeks prior to the attack.

A Turkish security official told Reuters on Monday that two of the attackers had left Turkey to travel to Moscow on the same flight on 2 March. The official said they entered Turkey to renew their Russian residence permits but that they were not radicalised there. He said the attackers had been living in Moscow for a long time.

Still, Turkey appears to have taken the attack seriously. On Tuesday, Turkish authorities announced that they detained 147 people over suspected ties to Islamic State in nationwide operations, interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, said on Tuesday, without directly mentioning the Moscow shooting.

Associated Press contributed reporting