Russia’s security service, the FSB, claimed on Monday to have thwarted an Islamic State suicide bomb attack that would have targeted shopping centers, public transportation, and other high-casualty soft targets.
Sky News quotes Russian media reports that two Russian-born ISIS recruits were ringleaders of the plot. Four suspects were arrested during an FSB raid on a bomb-making laboratory outside Moscow, one a Russian national and the other three hailing from “central Asia.” The FSB described one of the detainees as an “emissary from the Islamic State.”
“The agency released a video in which its agents inspect a house used by the group to make explosives while two suspects lie down on the floor in handcuffs. It didn’t say when the arrests took place,” adds the Associated Press.
Two of the people taken into custody were reportedly suicide bombers who would have carried out the attacks. It is not clear from early reporting if there were more suicide bombers standing by to receive armaments from the bomb factory that was raided.
Russian state propaganda outlet RT.com relays an FSB statement that materials collected in the Moscow raid match a peroxide-based explosive called “Mother of Satan,” which has been used in high-profile terrorist attacks in Manchester, Paris, and Brussels over the past few years.
The AP recalls the April suicide bombing that killed 16 in a St. Petersburg subway, and the subsequent May arrest of ISIS suspects accused of planning to attack Moscow in a scheme that looks broadly similar to the one the FSB says it foiled this weekend.
Newsweek adds to that history the November 2016 arrest of five militants linked to ISIS who were planning to attack Moscow and the Caucasus, plus seven February arrests connected to a plan to bomb Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sverdlovsk. The October 2015 bombing of a Russian jetliner over Egypt was also attributed to the Islamic State.
Various estimates say that between 3,000 and 9,000 recruits from the Russia and former Soviet nations in Central Asia traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State, a problem Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he intends to solve by killing them in Syria before they have a chance to return home to Russia.