ELEVEN people have been detained after an attack by Islamists at a Moscow concert hall that killed 137, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service told President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, according to Russian state news agency Tass.
Another 145 people were injured in the attack by assailants who burst into the concert hall and sprayed the crowd with gunfire.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on affiliated channels on social media. The attack was the deadliest in Russia in years and left the concert hall in flames and with a collapsing roof.
Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph had a message for the Russian leader.
Con Coughlin spelt it out that: ‘Russian President Vladimir Putin may have convinced himself that Russia’s main enemy lies in the West.’ He does not dispute that the ‘West’ is an enemy of Russia.
He added: ‘But the deadly attack on a Moscow concert hall … demonstrates that Islamist terrorists pose a far more deadly threat to his country’s wellbeing.’
He continues: ‘These days, Putin has adopted an entirely different approach – one where confronting the West, not Islamist extremism, has become his main priority.
‘Many of the Russian forces that fought Isil in Syria are now mired in the brutal conflict in Ukraine … After the devastating attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Concert Hall … he now finds himself fighting the wrong war.’
Coughlin insists Putin: ‘Would be better advised to give his backing to an international effort to combat the modern menace of Islamist inspired terrorism.’
He even recommends: ‘A good place to start would be at the UN where Moscow could concentrate its efforts on tackling the disturbing ride of Islamist terrorism. That could prove far more effective at keeping Russia’s citizens safe than persisting with his unwinnable war in the Ukraine.’
He obviously wants Russia’s aid in fighting the Hamas revolutionary nationalist movement.
In fact, in recent days, the Daily Telegraph has made no secret of the fact that British capitalism is in its greatest crisis ever, and that draconian measures are required against the working class and its trade unions, and the middle class, to force them to accept wage cuts and health cuts as the NHS is privatised, and living standards destroyed.
As the News Line has previously pointed out: ‘The United Kingdom has seen the biggest rise in “absolute poverty” in 30 years’, according to the latest data published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).’
In the UK, ‘relative poverty’ refers to the citizens whose income is 40 per cent below the national average, while ‘absolute poverty’ measures the number of people who cannot afford a standard of living.
UK Treasury spokesperson Sarah Olney commenting on this said: ‘This is a devastating rise, and behind these numbers will be stories of children going hungry and families unable to heat their homes.’
The shadow employment and social security minister Alison McGovern, commented that the ‘Conservative government crashed the economy and unleashed a cost of living crisis, pushing families across the country into poverty and a million children into destitution.’
With Friday night’s massacre it seems that the imperialist powers are calling in the Islamists to try and teach Russia a lesson that it must not defy imperialism, and instead must grovel before it.
In Moscow and other Russian towns and cities yesterday, electronic billboards displayed the image of a single burning candle and the word ‘Skorbim’ – ‘we mourn’.
People queued to lay flowers at a makeshift memorial to the victims of the shooting attack set up outside the Crocus City Concert Hall venue in the Moscow Region on Sunday March 24.
At this time of a desperate crisis of capitalism, there is only one way forward.
This is for the working people of the world to take general strike actions in support of the rights of the Palestinian people of Gaza, and to insist that it is capitalism that must be vanquished and that the bourgeois regimes that are planning to destroy the Palestinian masses for the benefit of Israel are over- thrown by socialist revolutions that will put an end to capitalism and go forward to worldwide socialism,
In the UK, the TUC must be made to lead the struggle and be forced to call a general strike to bring down the Tories who are in a desperate crisis and replace them with a Workers Government and Socialism.
