A military court in Moscow handed life sentences on Thursday to 15 of the 19 defendants convicted of involvement in the March 2024 massacre at the Crocus City Hall concert venue, bringing to a formal conclusion a prosecution that stretched across eighteen months and covered the deadliest terrorist attack on Russian soil in more than two decades, while leaving unanswered the question of who ultimately organised and financed the assault.
All 19 defendants were convicted and handed lengthy prison terms. Fifteen were sentenced to life imprisonment, one was handed 22 and a half years, and three others received 19 years and 11 months each.
Those serving life sentences will complete part of their terms in a standard custodial prison before being transferred to a special-regime penal colony, the most restrictive custodial classification in the Russian prison system. The verdict was delivered at the Second Western District Military Court in Moscow, with relatives of some of the victims present in the courtroom as the judge read the findings aloud.
The four men convicted of directly carrying out the shooting — Shamsidin Fariduni, Dalerjon Mirzoyev, Muhammadsobir Fayzov, and Saidakrami Rachabalizoda — are all citizens of Tajikistan.
At the time of the attack, the four men were aged between 20 and 31 and had been working in Russia in ordinary occupations — as a taxi driver, a factory employee, a construction worker, and in related manual labour. Three of the four gunmen pleaded guilty during the proceedings. The fourth, Rachabalizoda, maintained that he had not committed a crime and insisted he “carried out jihad.”
All four received life sentences.
The remaining eleven defendants sentenced to life were convicted on charges including facilitating, planning, or otherwise supporting the attack. Four defendants received fixed-term sentences rather than life imprisonment.
The trial opened at the military court in August 2025, conducted almost entirely behind closed doors on security grounds — a decision that drew sustained criticism from victims’ families, independent legal observers, and international human rights organisations, who said the closure prevented any meaningful scrutiny of the proceedings or the evidence presented by the state.
The attack itself occurred on the evening of March 22, 2024. Approximately 6,000 people had gathered at the Crocus City Hall venue in Krasnogorsk, on the western outskirts of Moscow, to attend a concert by the Russian rock band Picnic. The four gunmen entered the building and opened fire on concertgoers in the lobby before moving through the auditorium, shooting randomly into the crowd. They then set the venue alight using flammable liquid. The fire spread rapidly and caused the roof to collapse, killing a number of people who survived the initial shooting through smoke inhalation and structural failure. The attack left 149 people dead and more than 600 injured across the course of the evening and the emergency response that followed.
Islamic State Khorasan Province — IS-K, the Central Asian affiliate of the Islamic State — claimed responsibility for the attack within hours, posting video footage showing the gunmen firing on the crowd inside the auditorium.
The footage was verified as authentic by multiple intelligence agencies and independent open-source analysts. IS-K, which seeks to establish a caliphate across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran, had been assessed by Western intelligence services as a growing threat in Russia in the months before the attack.
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United States authorities said publicly in March 2024 that they had issued a specific warning to Moscow through diplomatic channels about a potential terrorist strike in Russia weeks before the Crocus attack occurred, a warning the Kremlin acknowledged receiving while publicly downplaying its specificity.
Despite the unambiguous attribution of the attack to IS-K, Russian authorities have from the outset simultaneously promoted a parallel narrative implicating Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin and senior Russian officials alleged, without presenting evidence in any public forum, that Ukraine had a role in the attack, and the Investigative Committee — Russia’s principal criminal investigation authority — said the assault had been “planned and carried out in the interests of the current leadership of Ukraine in order to destabilize the political situation.”
The committee also noted that the four gunmen had attempted to flee toward Ukrainian territory after leaving the concert hall. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described the claim as transparently false and predictable. No evidence of Ukrainian involvement has been produced in any public legal proceeding.
The victims’ families who were present at Thursday’s sentencing expressed a sense of incompleteness that the conviction of the immediate perpetrators could not resolve. “For us all, it’s like yesterday,” said Ivan Pomorin, who had been filming the concert at the time of the attack and was present in court. “For us, the victims and relatives of the victims, it is not clear whether everyone has been brought to justice. It looks like these are not the people who could organise it. The investigative committee should continue its work.” Pomorin’s assessment reflected a widespread belief among victims’ relatives that Thursday’s verdicts, while providing a measure of formal accountability for those who pulled the triggers and provided logistical support, left the architecture of the plot — its financing, its command structure, and the full chain of IS-K facilitation — formally unaddressed.
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The conduct of the trial itself remains deeply contested. When the four gunmen first appeared in public court hearings in the immediate aftermath of their arrests, hours after the attack on March 22, 2024, each showed visible signs of having been beaten. One was brought into court in a wheelchair, unable to stand. Independent legal observers and international human rights groups said the appearance of the defendants at that hearing established a credible basis to believe confessions and statements made in custody had been extracted under duress. Russia’s Federal Security Service denied the allegations. Since the formal trial proceedings began in August 2025, the near-total closure of the courtroom to independent observers and press made scrutiny of the evidence, the treatment of the accused, or the procedural fairness of the proceedings effectively impossible.
Concerns about Russia’s treatment of Tajik migrant workers intensified following the attack, with a broad crackdown on Central Asian migrants in Moscow and other major Russian cities in the months that followed, contributing to a sharp decline in migration from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and other Central Asian states to Russia. Migration volumes — already reduced since the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine — fell further in the aftermath of Crocus, as the Russian state’s treatment of Central Asian communities generated both fear and resentment across the region.
The verdicts come less than two weeks before the second anniversary of the attack on March 22. Russia has not announced any formal commemorative events. The Crocus City Hall venue itself has not reopened. Whether the investigation into the attack’s organising network beyond the nineteen convicted defendants will continue, and whether any further prosecutions are planned, has not been indicated by the Investigative Committee.