Some 45 people have been arrested in raids related to the New Years Day attacks which rocked the country on Wednesday. The Defence and Disaster Relief Minister Krill Serbin, who has been leading the government’s response to the crisis, said in a statement that those arrested were “a mixture of Polasi citizens and foreign nationals” and all who are being held under suspicion of aiding terrorism. Mr Serbin, who stated that the Prime Minister would be holding a press conference at some point tomorrow, said that the attacks were “a reminder of what brutal rhetoric can lead to” – an indication that the government wants to shift the focus onto the causes of the attacks.
But the government, and particularly the Prime Minister, has already been criticised over its handling of the attacks – with questions being asked about what it knew about apparent warnings that were raised by security services in Eiffelland. Writing in tomorrow’s Times, former Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Lebedev will also criticise the government but turns his fire on the Nationalist Party – claiming that the statement by the party’s leader, Alexei Sukhorukov, in the wake of Wednesday’s attacks was ‘incendiary’. Mr Lebedev said he felt it was ‘inevitable’ that ‘something would happen one day, when we have failed to take the fight to the Nationalists on their rhetoric, their fiction and their friends’.
