A professional attack plan
The police reportedly arrived one and a half hours after terrorists started attacking a huge shopping and entertainment center in Moscow called Crocus City Hall. One and half hours would have been a long time for terrorists to allow them to cause a huge carnage. It was Friday evening when there was a lot of traffic of people going home or going out, so the access by police and first responders was hampered. But as the attack was surprising and brief, even helicopters, which should have flown the security and rescue forces to the scene quickly, could not be mobilized in time.
The Russian investigating authorities have given an interim report on their investigation: The terrorists arrived at the scene at 6.54 pm, waited until the audience for the rock concert arrived, entered the building at 7.58 pm, and began the attack. They waited a full hour to make sure the venue filled up. (F.A.: Various concertgoers reported that there was a solid security presence).
Five terrorists left the building at 8.11 pm. They left one behind, who was killed on the spot. The entire attack lasted less than 15 minutes. They had gasoline in plastic bottles with them, which they used to set the hall on fire. They drove away in a hurry, crashing into a family.
Later, another terrorist was killed near Bryansk, close to the Ukrainian border. Four terrorists who were still alive were arrested there and, as pictures show, roughly treated by the pursuers.
The plan of the terrorists’ masterminds was perfect: the timing and location were well chosen. In order to kill more people than they could have done with their weapons, they set fire to a huge building where people were trapped. Most of the victims died from the fire.
They knew exactly where to go, when to go, when to start, how to start, and what to do in the second part of the attack by setting the building on fire.
The secret masterminds recruited six men mainly via telegram, including one who said he was a hairdresser by profession, (plus more acting in the background) and turned them into terrorists who did not need to bring weapons because secret arsenals had been prepared for them in Moscow. All the six shooters had to do was execute the plan and pull the trigger.
Terrorists without ISIS characteristics
The terrorists are said to be foreigners from Tajikistan with limited knowledge of Russian. These executors of the plan did what their masterminds told them to do, but made mistakes that ISIS terrorists would avoid: The gunmen arrived in the same white Peugeot and left the crime scene in the same car. Even less skillful bank robbers would change cars after their robbery and scatter to reassemble later.
It seems that these terrorists, unlike the bank robbers, did not know what they were doing. If they had been involved in the planning themselves, they would not have used the same car and would not have left the scene of the crime together, but would have split up into individuals, each of whom would have taken a different escape route. We must therefore assume that they only received and carried out orders. And perhaps that their instigators had set them up and wanted them to stay together and be caught before they could enter Ukraine, thus leaving no compromising traces.
In a video released by the Russian authorities, one of the suspects, pinned to the ground, says that he shot down people at the mall for money and that he was approached by people to carry out the attack on the Telegram messaging app about a month ago.
They were captured in the vicinity of the city of Bryansk, 385 km from the Crocus City Hall, and close to the Ukrainian border which they intended to cross. The escape route is reminiscent of the murderer who killed the Russian journalist Darya Dugina with a car bomb in 2022 and fled Russia via Estonia after the crime.
While the first part of the terror plan in Moscow was professional from their masterminds’ point of view, the second part, the terrorists’ escape, looks to an observer like myself amateurish and foolish, and raises questions.
A manipulated narrative
The US statements were interesting as they tried to put a different spin on it: Two hours after the terrorist attack, they announced that Kiev had nothing to do with it, although one wonders how the US knew that so quickly. Another two hours later, a White House spokesman announced that the U.S. had information about a possible terrorist attack in early March, which it had warned about on its embassy website in Russia on March 7. Later that night, the US reported that it suspected IS was behind the attack. Allegedly, they also passed this information on to the Russian secret services at the beginning of March. Russian agencies have confirmed that they received information from the Americans, but it was vague (and therefore not very meaningful).
The Western media and even Seymour Hersh repeated the claim by the US government that it had duly warned the Russians of a planned attack by ISIS in Moscow and that the Russians had disregarded this warning. The Russians denied that they were duly warned of the events. If the United States’ private warning to the Russians is the same as the warnings issued publicly by the U.S. and British embassies in Moscow on March 7, then it was indeed vague. It did not say who the attackers might be, and the warning was limited to a 48-hour period, and those 48 hours passed without an attack occurring and without any further warning being issued. In its article on the terror attack, the New York Times gives an insight into the dubious usefulness of such a warning: “The adversarial relation between Washington and Moscow prevented U.S. officials from sharing any information about the plot beyond what was necessary out of fear Russian authorities might learn their intelligence sources and methods”. So who decides what is necessary and what information should be withheld? And were there other motives for withholding information?
On March 10, a rock concert was held featuring Shaman, a popular Russian singer-songwriter and music producer with strong patriotic nationalist views and a proponent of the special military operation in Ukraine, attracting a like-minded audience that would have been an obvious target after the 48-hour US warning, according to the Washington Post. Western media had accused the Russian authorities of negligently ignoring these warnings. Since the warning was not repeated and no further attack occurred, the Russians may have assumed that the danger had passed when another concert took place twelve days later, on March 22, the day of the terrorist attack.
Russia has supported the Syrian government against ISIS and other US and Israeli-backed terrorist groups in Syria, and in Afghanistan, Russia is also supporting the Taliban against ISIS. In 2022, ISIS carried out an attack on the Russian embassy in Kabul.
At first glance, it seems plausible that ISIS (or ISIS-K) could have carried out a revenge attack on Russia, but this crime lacks some of the typical ISIS characteristics. The terrorists not only behaved unprofessionally when they left the scene. ISIS terrorists usually fight fiercely when facing enemies or blow themselves up (preferably together with their captors) to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy. But these so-called ISIS terrorists even threw away their weapons as they drove towards the Ukrainian border.
ISIS made a claim, which may be a fabrication, that its members “killed and wounded hundreds of people and caused great destruction before retreating safely to their bases”. This was taken by Washington and its Western political and media partners as proof of ISIS’s responsibility. The alleged ISIS claim that the terrorists “retreated safely to their bases” was contradicted by the facts. The perpetrators did not consider themselves to be engaged in a holy war either, but stated that they had been offered money for the crime. They spoke of half a million roubles, which corresponds to around 5,000 euros. This is in direct contradiction to what ISIS conveys to its fighters: Your reward is martyrdom and paradise, not money.
The Russian investigative authorities stated that “The investigation has confirmed data that the perpetrators of the terrorist attack received significant amounts of money and cryptocurrencies from Ukraine, which were used to prepare the crime.” Corresponding evidence has not yet been published. Ukraine is known as a cryptocurrency hotspot.
Each terrorist was paid USD 5,000 before the attack, and they received instructions via telegrams in the form of voice messages, and in one of these messages they were told to flee towards Ukraine after the terrorist attack, that arrangements would be made to allow them to cross the border, that they would be taken to Kiev where they would be rewarded, and that they would be treated like heroes.
This instruction could have been a lie to encourage them to carry out the operation. What is clear is that they were not highly motivated jihadists seeking martyrdom.
The evidence for a trail to Ukraine is growing, but is not yet entirely conclusive.
Oleksiy Danilov, the then Secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine, appeared on Ukrainian television on the day of the terrorist attack and said, as explained in the following video: “Is it fun in Moscow today? I think a lot of fun for you. I think we ought to do this sort of fun more often. You are after all brotherly people and maybe we should visit you more regularly.”
In the recent interview below with Ukrainian television, General Vasyl Vasyliovych Malyuk, head of the Ukrainian Security Service (SSU), gave details of several state-sponsored killings in Ukraine and alleged internal Ukrainian government processes that authorized them.
Yet David Sacks, author and founder (including co-founder of PayPal) and investor with more than 20 unicorns in his portfolio, is berated on “X” by Keith Olbermann, a star journalist who has worked for mainstream media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC, where he hosted a prime-time show, for stating the obvious.
A terrorist met with an instigator in Turkey before the terrorist attack.
Even before the official publication of the results of the investigation commission, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke of the involvement of foreign secret services in the tragedy. Omer Celik, spokesman for Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (Erdogan’s party), said Istanbul’s stance reflected concerns about possible links between terrorist organizations and foreign intelligence services:
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Following the terrorist attack in Moscow, the headquarters of the Ukrainian secret service SBU, which together with the military secret service GRU is masterminding terrorist attacks inside Russia, was destroyed. The SBU has confirmed the Russian missile attack. Following a tip-off from the Russians, Turkish special forces searched a terrorist training center in Turkey with possible links to Ukraine at almost the same time and made arrests.
“We express our sincere condolences to the Russian people for this tragic event. (…) Of course, it is impossible to carry out such a professional action without the support of the secret services of any state. Such actions always have sponsors. There are lobbies that want the conflict to continue.”
Kiev is trying to wash its bloody hands in innocence.
The way Ukraine reacted was no less interesting than the United States: Kiev put out a statement claiming it would “never resort to terrorism” which is, of course, a lie. Since 2014 Kiev has terrorized civilians in the Donbas with fighter jets and cluster bombs. Later it also bombed Russian cities, villages and markets, not military targets.
Indeed, terror is a familiar tool for Kiev. The Ukrainian secret service has murdered Darya Dugina and other Russian journalists or carried out assassination attempts on journalists, which Kiev has openly boasted about. In the new Russian territories, Ukrainian terror is the order of the day. During the recent elections, for example, an election worker was murdered with a car bomb. Ukrainian terror is so omnipresent there that it is almost impossible to keep track of all the cases.
The Economist has openly reported on a “murder program” that the Ukrainian secret service has been running since at least 2015 to eliminate government critics inside and outside Ukraine. There was no outcry in the Western media, showing once again what “Western values” really stand for.
Here are some of the critics murdered by Ukraine.
The West condones (and is complicit in) Ukrainian terrorist attacks and political murders
In its article on the “murder program” of the Ukrainian secret services, The Economist has nothing to criticize, as the victims are, after all, “pro-Russian propagandists”, “collaborators” or “terrorists”.
The fact that the Ukrainian Secret Service murders its own compatriots without charge or trial and that it also carries out political murders abroad is reported quite openly by The Economist, even naming the responsible directorate of the Secret Service and the names of those responsible.
The Economist article reports that Valentin Naliwajtschenko, who became head of the Ukrainian secret service SBU after the Maidan, initiated the murder program.
As political arrests were the norm at the time, Ukrainian prisons were overcrowded and The Economist quotes Nalivaychenko as saying:
“We reluctantly came to the conclusion that we had to eliminate terrorists.”
The Economist mainly reports on murders carried out by the Directorate in Donbas, but that was by no means all.
Opponents of the government were also summarily murdered in Ukraine. This should come as no surprise, as Naliwajtschenko is a self-confessed neo-Nazi, who incidentally also played a role in the fatal shootings on the Maidan in 2014, which he was then able to conceal as head of the Ukrainian secret service, and who became head of the Ukrainian secret service after the Maidan in 2014 – something that has never bothered Western politicians and the media.
What the West calls “Russian propaganda” is the reality that a neo-Nazi terrorist state took power in Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan coup. However, as the UNHCR has often noted in its reports on the human rights situation in Ukraine, a significant number of government critics were imprisoned across the country during the Maidan, and many of them disappeared into thin air in the torture chambers of the Ukrainian secret service SBU. In addition, a number of government critics have been murdered since the Maidan; instead of solving these crimes, the Maidan governments have delayed the trials. This is also mentioned in UNHCR reports.
According to the Washington Post, among others, “a former Russian submarine commander was killed while jogging in a park in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar and a militant blogger was killed in a cafe in St. Petersburg.” Or Yevgeny Shilin, the leader of a separatist group in eastern Ukraine, was shot dead in a restaurant in Moscow, according to the Washington Post. These were not regular military personnel or government officials, but civilians.
Can you imagine the US response if the Russian secret service provided the Cuban or Venezuelan secret service with state-of-the-art equipment and trained their agents in sabotage and assassination squads? What if these Russian-trained agents then killed US journalists and other civilians and launched attacks against the US military?
The US-led West is acting in a very cynical manner. The USA and EU are currently Ukraine’s only sources of financial support. Even though Kiev is undeniably responsible for numerous terrorist incidents in Russia, the West has not criticized Kiev for this and has continued to fund the Kiev regime. This made the West an accomplice of Kiev.
Although Russia has not yet publicly named the perpetrators, it is clear that the trail most likely ends in Ukraine. The US intelligence services support the Ukrainian secret services and work closely with them. It is therefore likely that the US knew about the plans, as previous attacks in Russia show, which were initially denied by Kiev and later admitted.
The hasty attempt by the US to attribute the terrorist attack to ISIS serves to divert attention away from the likely suspects. This is reminiscent of the terrorist attack against Nord Stream, which the United States wanted to blame on Ukraine. There are growing indications that Ukraine is behind the attack, which means that the British and American intelligence services are also likely to be involved. How will the West react when the Russians present evidence of their involvement? They will call it “Russian propaganda,” as usual.