'Did the Americans plan the Paris terror attacks?' asks leading Russian tabloid

American intelligence services carried out the Charlie Hebdo terror attack to punish France for considering dropping sanctions against Russia – or at least, that's the version of events presented in one of Russia's leading newspapers today.

The front page splash in Komsomolskaya Pravda, which asks "Did the Americans Plan the Paris Terror Attack?", is just the latest of a series of bizarre conspiracy theories put forward by some of the Russian press in the wake of last week's tragedy.

The headline relates to a page 7 interview with a political scientist called Alexander Zhilin, who links the murders of 16 people at Charlie Hebdo and a Kosher supermarket to disagreements between western governments about how to deal with sanctions against Russia.

The trigger, he claimed, was Francois Hollande's suggestion on January 5 that sanctions imposed against Russia should be reconsidered.

Such dissent in the ranks, Mr Zhilin suggests, could not be tolerated by the shadowy warmongers who run the United States.

"This was not in Washington's plans, which decided to use European resources to attack Russia," he says. "[To respond to this they used] Terror. It is cheap and effective." Mr Zhilin goes on to claim that Angela Merkel toughened her stance against Russia only after an explosion at a chemical factory in September, which he insinuates was also the work of American spies.

Mr Zhilin's views are not challenged by his interviewer, but treated as a straight analysis of the attacks.

Europe and the United States have imposed a range of sanctions against Russia in retaliation for its annexation of Crimea and support for an ongoing secessionist insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

While the conspiracy theory may sound bizarre, Komsomolskaya Pravda is not the first influential Russian outlet to tie the United States to the Paris attack.

On the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack Life News, a fiercely pro-Kremlin website and TV station, carried an interview with an "expert" called Alexei Martyunov, who also blamed the attacks on "American special services."

Anti-American conspiracy theories have become a staple of pro-Kremlin media since the February revolution in Ukraine and Russia's subsequent annexation of Crimea sent relations between Moscow and Washington into a nose-dive.

Pundits have also blamed the CIA for organising the "coup" against Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president, and accused the United States of conspiring with Saudi Arabia to collapse world oil prices in order to weaken Russia.

While the overwhelming response to the Paris attacks has been an outpouring of sympathy, some in Russia have suggested the incident has exposed a fundamental cultural gap between Europe and Russia, where they suggest respect for religion trumps the right to freedom of speech.

Komsomolskaya Pravda's special correspondent in Paris wrote in a dispatch about arguing with "liberal French friends" over the cartoons during Sunday's unity march.

Meanwhile Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman president of Chechnya, took to Instagram to say "no one should be allowed" to insult the prophet in the way Charlie Hebdo did.

Most public figures and media, however, have been united in unequivocal condemnation of the attacks – regardless of their political sympathies.

Novaya Gazeta, a liberal opposition paper, ran a front page with "We are Charlie Hebdo". Meanwhile, the editorial team of Echo of Moscow, a leading radio station, posed in "Je Suis Charlie" T-shirts.

And usually hawkish, anti-Western figures have joined in calls for unity.

Alexei Pushkov, a vociferous critic of the West who chairs the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, wrote on Twitter that the attack proved the "real threat" to Europe came from terrorists, not from Russia.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor of Kremlin-sponsored television station RT, tweeted that Russia and the West would be "on the same side of the barricade" when World War Three breaks out. Such war is, she said, imminent.