Russian massacre suspects' homeland is plagued by poverty and religious strife

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Russian massacre suspects' homeland is plagued by poverty and religious strife

2024-03-25 17:13 Last Updated At：03-26 07:18

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — The four men charged with the have been identified by authorities as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate to Russia each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences.

Along with grinding poverty, Tajikistan is rife with religious tensions. Hard-line Islamists were one of the main forces opposing the government in a 1990s civil war that devastated the country. The militants claiming responsibility for the Moscow — a branch of the Islamic State group in neighboring Afghanistan — reportedly recruit heavily from Tajikistan.

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In this photo released by the Russian Emergency Ministry Press Service, Russian Emergency Ministry rescuers work inside the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, March 23, 2024, following an attack Friday, for which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (Russian Emergency Ministry Press Service via AP)

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — The four men charged with the have been identified by authorities as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate to Russia each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences.

FILE - A national flag of Tajikistan is hoisted to the top of the 165-meter (541.34 feet) flagpole in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Tuesday, May 24, 2011. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (AP Photo/Olga Tutubalina, File)

Mirzoyev reportedly had obtained a three-month residency permit in the city of Novosibirsk, but it had expired. In video of his interrogation shared on Russian social media, he reportedly says he recently was living in a Moscow hostel with another of the suspects. The court said he is married and has four children, but it was unclear if he was employed.

People place flowers at a makeshift memorial in front of the Crocus City Hall on the western outskirts of Moscow, Russia, Monday, March 25, 2024. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlyanichenko)

As many as 1.5 million Tajik migrants are estimated to be in Russia after fleeing the poverty and unemployment that plague their landlocked, mountainous country. An array of mineral resources are present in Tajikistan, but the industry has been slow to develop because of belated foreign investment and poor geological data, among other factors.

Mukhammadsobir Faizov, a suspect in Friday's shooting at the Crocus City Hall, sits in a glass cage in the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 24, 2024. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

But attacks that began in 2015 were claimed by or attributed to the Islamic State group. The group opposed Russia’s intervention in Syria, where Moscow sought to tip the balance in favor of President Bashar Assad’s forces.

Shamsidin Fariduni, a suspect in the Crocus City Hall shooting on Friday sits in a glass cage in the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 24, 2024. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

A suspect in the Crocus City Hall shooting on Friday sits in a courtroom in the Basmanny District Court, in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 24, 2024. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, a suspect in the Crocus City Hall shooting on Friday, sits in a glass cage in the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 24, 2024. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

In this photo taken from video released by Investigative Committee of Russia on Sunday, March 24, 2024, a suspect in the Crocus City Hall shooting on Friday is escorted to the Russian Investigative Committee headquarters in Moscow, Russia. (Investigative Committee of Russia via AP)

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TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — The four men charged with the have been identified by authorities as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate to Russia each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences.

Mirzoyev reportedly had obtained a three-month residency permit in the city of Novosibirsk, but it had expired. In video of his interrogation shared on Russian social media, he reportedly says he recently was living in a Moscow hostel with another of the suspects. The court said he is married and has four children, but it was unclear if he was employed.

As many as 1.5 million Tajik migrants are estimated to be in Russia after fleeing the poverty and unemployment that plague their landlocked, mountainous country. An array of mineral resources are present in Tajikistan, but the industry has been slow to develop because of belated foreign investment and poor geological data, among other factors.

But attacks that began in 2015 were claimed by or attributed to the Islamic State group. The group opposed Russia’s intervention in Syria, where Moscow sought to tip the balance in favor of President Bashar Assad’s forces.

Shamsidin Fariduni, a suspect in the Crocus City Hall shooting on Friday sits in a glass cage in the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 24, 2024. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

A suspect in the Crocus City Hall shooting on Friday sits in a courtroom in the Basmanny District Court, in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 24, 2024. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, a suspect in the Crocus City Hall shooting on Friday, sits in a glass cage in the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 24, 2024. The four men charged with the massacre at a Moscow theater have been identified by the Russian government as citizens of Tajikistan, some of the thousands who migrate each year from the poorest of the former Soviet republics to scrape out marginal existences. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

In this photo taken from video released by Investigative Committee of Russia on Sunday, March 24, 2024, a suspect in the Crocus City Hall shooting on Friday is escorted to the Russian Investigative Committee headquarters in Moscow, Russia. (Investigative Committee of Russia via AP)

The four suspects who were arraigned in a Moscow court late Sunday on appeared to have been beaten or injured during their detention. One was wheeled in on a gurney clad only in a hospital gown.

Here is a look at the people, militant groups and political history connected to the Moscow attack:

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.

Mirzoyev reportedly had obtained a three-month residency permit in the city of Novosibirsk, but it had expired. In video of his interrogation shared on Russian social media, he reportedly says he recently was living in a Moscow hostel with another of the suspects. The court said he is married and has four children, but it was unclear if he was employed.

Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, 30, is 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, apparently 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. He reportedly told interrogators that he was offered 500,000 rubles (about $5,425) to carry out the attack — the equivalent of about 2.5 years of the average wage in Tajikistan.

Mukhammadsobir Fayzov, 19, was brought into the courtroom on a gurney, with a catheter attached and one eye injured or missing, and he appeared to fade in an out of consciousness. He had worked as an apprentice in a barbershop in the declining textile-mill city of Ivanovo, but reports said he left that job in November.

As many as 1.5 million Tajik migrants are estimated to be in Russia after fleeing the poverty and unemployment that plague their landlocked, mountainous country. An array of mineral resources are present in Tajikistan, but the industry has been slow to develop because of belated foreign investment and poor geological data, among other factors.

Although its nearly 10 million people are overwhelmingly Muslim, tensions connected to Islam are rife.

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, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon took steps to sharply curtail religious freedoms.

The government limited how many mosques could be built, prohibited women and children under 18 from attending mosques at all, and banned religious instruction outside the home for children. Critics say the limits encouraged people to turn to underground and radical Muslim factions via the internet.

Tajikistan has not made any official statement about the arrest of the four men suspected in the attack. But Rahmon was quoted by his government's press service as telling Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call that “terrorists have neither nationality, nor a homeland, nor religion.”

Most attacks tied to Islamic extremists that afflicted Russia in the past quarter century were committed by Chechen separatists, such as the 2004 Beslan school seizure that killed more than 300 people — or were blamed on them, as in the 1999 apartment bombings that triggered the second Russia-Chechnya war.

But attacks that began in 2015 were claimed by or attributed to the Islamic State group. The group opposed Russia’s intervention in Syria, where Moscow sought to tip the balance in favor of President Bashar Assad’s forces.

After IS declared a caliphate in large parts of Syria and Iraq in June 2014, thousands of men and women from around the world came to join the extremist group. Those included thousands from the former Soviet Union, among them hundreds from Tajikistan.

One of the most prominent figures to join IS was Gulmurod Khalimov, who was an officer with Tajikistan’s special forces before defecting and joining IS in Syria in 2015. In 2017, the Russian military said Khalimov was killed in a Russian airstrike in Syria.

IS claimed responsibility for the 2015 bombing of a Russian airliner that was bringing tourists home from the Egyptian resort Sharm al-Sheik. Two years later, it claimed to be behind the suicide bombing of a subway train in St. Petersburg that killed 15 people.

Two weeks before the Moscow theater massacre, Russian officials said they had wiped out members of an IS cell that was planning to attack a synagogue. Earlier in the month, it reported killing six IS fighters in the Ingushetia region adjacent to Chechnya.

Violence erupts on campuses as protesters and counter-protesters clash over the war in Gaza

2024-05-02 08:20 Last Updated At：08:30

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Counter-protesters “forcefully" attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA early Wednesday, the university's chancellor said, and activists clashed with police officers who destroyed their tents at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, part of a series of escalating violence on some college campuses over the war in Gaza.

UCLA administrators and campus police delayed intervening and calling for law enforcement backup in the brawl on the Los Angeles campus, prompting widespread condemnation from Muslim students to the city’s mayor to California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The counter-protesters, some of whom carried Israeli flags, threw traffic cones and chairs, released pepper spray, and pulled down the barricade surrounding the encampment. University officials said 15 people were injured in the confrontation, including one person who was hospitalized.

The chaotic scenes unfolded Wednesday after police burst into a building occupied by anti-war protesters at Columbia University on Tuesday night, breaking up a demonstration that had paralyzed the school.

Chancellor Gene Block at UCLA said in a statement that “a group of instigators” came on campus Tuesday night to “forcefully attack” the pro-Palestinian encampment.

After a couple of hours of scuffles, police wearing helmets and face shields separated the groups. Later Wednesday, pro-Palestinian protesters rebuilt a barricade around their encampment.

Muslim organizations and students blasted university officials and police in a Wednesday news conference, saying they failed to intervene as students in the pro-Palestinian encampment were verbally harassed, pepper sprayed and beaten.

“The community needs to feel the police are protecting them, not enabling others to harm them,” said Rebecca Husaini, chief of staff for the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Speakers disputed the university’s account that 15 people were injured and one hospitalized, saying the number of people taken to the hospital was higher. One student described needing to go to the hospital after being hit in the head by an object wielded by counter-protesters.

Several students who spoke during the news conference said they had to rely on each other, not the police, for support as they were attacked, and that many in the pro-Palestinian encampment remained peaceful and did not engage with counter-protesters.

UCLA canceled classes Wednesday.

In Madison, a scrum broke out Wednesday after police with shields removed all but one tent and shoved protesters. Four officers were injured, including a state trooper who was hit in the head with a skateboard, authorities said. More tents sprang up within hours. More than 30 people were initially detained, but police said only four were charged with battering law enforcement.

Tent encampments of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies that support the war in Gaza have spread across campuses nationwide in a student movement unlike any other this century. The ensuing police crackdowns echoed actions decades ago against a much larger protest movement protesting the Vietnam War.

This is all playing out in an election year in the U.S., raising questions about whether young voters — who are critical for Democrats — will back President Joe Biden's reelection effort, given his staunch support of Israel.

There have been confrontations with law enforcement and more than 1,300 arrests. In rare instances, university officials and protest leaders struck agreements to restrict the disruption to campus life and upcoming commencement ceremonies.

No arrests have been reported. Officials have not clarified whether the demonstrators were all students.

Block promised the university will conduct a thorough investigation.

“However one feels about the encampment, this attack on our students, faculty and community members was utterly unacceptable,” Block said. “It has shaken our campus to its core.”

UCLA senior Edgar Gomez ventured outside his dorm to watch the ruckus unfold.

“I’ve never seen this happen before," said Gomez, adding that he isn’t with either group. "I’ve never seen people get so heated.”

Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass both called for accountability of those involved in the melee. A spokesperson for the governor said outside law enforcement was sent to the campus after “unacceptable” delays in the university’s police force response to the clashes.

The nationwide campus demonstrations began at Columbia to protest Israel’s offensive in Gaza after Hamas launched a deadly attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. Militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. Vowing to stamp out Hamas, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the Health Ministry there.

Late Tuesday, New York City police officers entered Columbia's campus and cleared a tent encampment, along with Hamilton Hall, where a stream of officers used a ladder to climb through a second-floor window, and police said protesters inside presented no substantial resistance. The demonstrators had seized the Ivy League school building about 20 hours earlier.

Protesters first set up a tent encampment at Columbia almost two weeks ago. The school sent in police to clear the tents the following day, arresting more than 100 people. But the protesters returned.

Negotiations between the protesters and the college ground to a halt in recent days, and the school set a Monday deadline for the activists to abandon the tent encampment or be suspended.

Instead, protesters took over Hamilton Hall early Tuesday, carrying in furniture and metal barricades.

In a letter to senior police officials, Columbia President Nemat Shafik, who uses the first name Minouche, said the administration asked officers to remove protesters “with the utmost regret.”

Columbia on Wednesday called Hamilton Hall “an active crime scene” under NYPD investigation and limited campus access, barring the media.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams blamed “outside agitators” on Wednesday for leading the demonstrations and repeatedly cited the presence of a woman on Columbia’s campus whose husband said had been “convicted for terrorism.” The woman, Nahla Al-Arian, wasn’t on Columbia’s campus this week and isn’t among the protesters who were arrested.

Al-Arian, a retired elementary school teacher, told The Associated Press that Adams misstated both her role in the protests and the facts about her husband, Sami Al-Arian, a prominent Palestinian activist. Nahla Al-Arian said she did go to Columbia for one day on April 25 to see the protest encampment there but left after she got tired.

Blocks away from Columbia, at The City College of New York, video footage showed officers forcing some protesters to the ground late Tuesday and shoving others as they cleared the street and sidewalks.

Close to 300 protesters were arrested in the crackdowns at Columbia and City College, officials said.

Brown University reached an agreement Tuesday with protesters on its Rhode Island campus. Demonstrators closed their encampment after administrators agreed to consider a vote to divest from Israel in October — apparently the first U.S. college to agree to such a demand.

Meanwhile, protest encampments were cleared by the police, resulting in arrests, or closed up voluntarily at schools across the U.S., including Fordham University in New York, Portland State in Oregon, Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona and Tulane University in New Orleans.

Israel and its supporters have branded the university protests antisemitic, while Israel’s critics say it uses those allegations to silence opposition. Although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, organizers of the protests, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at defending Palestinian rights and protesting the war.

Offenhartz and Frederick reported from New York. Associated Press journalists around the country contributed to this report, including Cedar Attanasio, Jonathan Mattise, Stefanie Dazio, Jae C. Hong, Colleen Long, Karen Matthews, Sarah Brumfield, Carolyn Thompson, Philip Marcelo, Corey Williams and Felicia Fonseca.