After the March terror attack in a Moscow concert hall, Russia was quick to arrest four migrant men and accuse Ukraine of having involvement in the attack - but experts, a Tajik official, and relatives of the accused all pointed to holes in the Kremlin's account of the attack, according to a Telegraph investigation published on Sunday.
Four Tajik men were charged within two days of the spree that killed 137 people at Crocus City Hall. Russian courts found that the men led the attack in the name of IS-K, a terror group linked to ISIS. However, families of the gunmen and experts reportedly expressed doubt that this was the case.
Neighbors and family members all told the Telegraph that the gunmen hadn't known each other before moving to Russia.
Muyassar Zargarova, the 52-year-old mother of one of the alleged gunmen, told the source that she had spoken to her son only hours before the attack - telling him about the dinner she had prepared that night.
She maintained to the Telegraph that her son would not have carried out any act of violence despite his criminal record and two-year sentence in Tajikistan.
“If I were to ask my son to kill one of the chickens in our yard, he would refuse to do it,” she said. “He would say. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’”
Unnamed relatives defended Dalerjon Mizoev's innocence, claiming that he was not even in Moscow at the time of the attacks. They claimed he was 2000 miles from Moscow, in Novosibirsk.
Those familiar with the 19-year-old accused attacker Muhammadsobir Faizov said similar, claiming that he was in the city of Ivanovo during the attack.
A Tajik official, unnamed in the report, also claimed that two of the men had been in Tajikistan during the attack.
The Telegraph reported that all four men had faced issues in their migration status and most had been planning to move back to Tajikistan within days of the attack.
None of the men had been religious, according to families' comments to the Telegraph, drawing further holes in why they would be involved with an Islamic terror organization.
Many of the families said that their loved ones were being used as collateral damage, so that the Kremlin could maintain public confidence by swiftly delivering justice amid its less-than-popular war in Ukraine.
Experts also had doubts on the Kremlin's account of events, arguing that none of the alleged attackers had been proud of the attack - something to be expected of Islamic terrorists.
Rustam Azizi, who has interviewed terrorists for his research, told the Telegraph that he believed the men had been fall men to create a distraction on behalf of the Russian authorities.
Evidence against the four men
Despite his theory, using migrant sleeper cells does fall within the known strategy of IS-K.
“To go somewhere with your own terrorists is risky, but if you find some locals, it’s not costly as they are already existing there…you just have to find a way to arm them,” he said.
But “you have to use them as soon as possible, because it’s risky to keep them for a long period of time”, said Azizi, the research director of Tahlil, a Dushanbe-based NGO.
“Police can capture them and some might even try to escape the radical group.”
Additionally, some of the men was arrested in similar outfits to the attackers photographed during the attack.