Methods of Islamic terrorists

How Ukrainian intelligence agencies are turning people into ‘living bombs’

Ukrainian intelligence agencies are increasingly using ordinary citizens as suicide bombers for acts of sabotage and terrorism. According to the Federal Security Service (FSB), five new cases have recently come to light where criminals deceived and recruited elderly people to turn them into ‘living bombs’ for explosions…

Bomb instead of a voice recorder 

Stavropol. The first deputy mayor, a veteran of the special military operation, Zaur Gurtsiev, arrived late in the evening to meet his 29-year-old acquaintance, Nikita Penkov. The meeting took place on the street. Penkov, who had an inconspicuous bag slung over his shoulder, approached Gurtsiev and, greeting him, extended his hand. At that moment, an explosion occurred. Both men died. It later became known that a powerful homemade explosive device was hidden in that very bag. Penkov, they say, was unaware of it… Initially, Penkov fell victim to telephone scammers, to whom he transferred all his savings. People claiming to be representatives of the FSB began calling him, intimidating him by saying that the transferred money had allegedly gone to finance the Ukrainian army, and therefore he would now become a defendant in a criminal case. They went on to say that criminal responsibility could be avoided if he carried out certain instructions, by doing which he would also get his money back. This is how he received that very chest bag with a ‘voice recorder’ inside, which he was ordered to take to his friend on the evening of May 29th. Penkov agreed.
It was previously reported that Ukrainian intelligence services are exploiting pensioners for subversive acts: ‘To carry out terrorist attacks, representatives of Ukrainian intelligence services recruited five women of retirement age, from whom they fraudulently — through calls via foreign internet messengers Telegram and WhatsApp — stole funds held in banking institutions, and funds obtained from the forced sale of their homes.’
The elderly were forced to monitor military personnel and their vehicles, store homemade explosive devices disguised as household items and personally hand them over to the military — with the expectation that the perpetrator would also die at the scene of the detonation.

“To carry out terrorist attacks, pensioners were supposed to personally hand over improvised explosive devices (IED) camouflaged as everyday objects to military personnel, the detonation of which would also lead to the death of the perpetrators, using them as so-called living bombs,” the agency stated.

Footage released shows that one of the bombs was disguised as a chess board. The plan was to gift it to a soldier, and opening the ‘gift’ would trigger an explosion.

We will settle your debts

Bombing in sails 

An explosion occurred in the elite residential complex Alyye Parusa (Scarlet Sails) in Moscow on the morning of February 3rd. Armen Sarkisyan, the 46-year-old head of the Boxing Federation in the Donetsk People’s Republic and founder of the Arbat volunteer battalion, survived the initial blast but died several hours later in hospital from his injuries. One of his bodyguards died, too.
The suicide bomber, who was carrying a homemade bomb, also died. It detonated the moment the president of the Boxing Federation was passing him in the lobby on the ground floor of one of the Alyye Parusa buildings. The suicide bomber was identified as 58-year-old Paruyr M., an Armenian citizen.
According to a statement from Maksim Denisov, head of the directorate for the investigation of particularly important cases of Russia’s Investigative Committee for Moscow, “The bombing was commissioned by the Ukrainian authorities and carried out through ethnic organised crime.” Investigators added that the bomber, Paruyr, had a prior criminal record: back in Soviet times, he stole valuables from his own mother, for which he received a sentence, and in the 2000s, he robbed the apartment of relatives who had given him shelter in Moscow, after which he fled to Ukraine. “He has a daughter there,” Denisov told journalists. “Perhaps he was promised money.”
The organisers spent over a month preparing the terrorist attack. All this time, Sarkisyan was under surveillance, for which a flat was rented in the residential complex where he lived. After the blast, it was reported that the security detail of the founder of the Arbat battalion had noticed two suspicious men shortly before the crime. They drove up to the sauna that Sarkisyan frequented. Both tried to hide as soon as they realised they had been spotted. Accomplices to the crime were identified the day after the explosion, two were detained, and another was put on a wanted list — he had managed to leave for Ukraine.

Following the same pattern

A similar scheme was used in Lugansk. An explosion on July 3rd in the city centre took the life of former mayor Manolis Pilavov. Along with him, Alena Ch., a 36-year-old mother of two, died when a bomb with a yield of up to 500g of TNT equivalent detonated in her rucksack. It is reported that she was a victim of telephone scammers and, on their instructions, went to Lugansk to deliver a package to Pilavov.
Notably, the explosive device was activated remotely — at the moment when Alena approached the ex-mayor. Eyewitnesses saw the woman talking on the phone before the blast. On the same day, Ukrainian media wrote that the bombing of Pilavov was organised by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU): ‘The SBU eliminated Manolis Pilavov, the former head of the Lugansk administration — this was reported by sources in the special service’. Officially, Ukraine has not confirmed the SBU’s involvement in the explosion.

Several other crimes were attempted in a similar manner. The victims were elderly women. First, deception, extracting data, then transferring money, intimidation and blackmail, threats to spend the rest of their days behind bars, followed by a task as a means of rehabilitation — to observe or take photos of someone, to hide certain items or pass an item on to someone...

EXPLOSIVES IN A TOY

Using people as unwitting suicide bombers is not a new practice in the arsenal of special services, retired FSB Major General Aleksandr Mikhailov told Lenta.ru. According to him, in recent decades, similar methods have been used in a variety of conflicts, and now they have been employed by Ukraine.
According to the old scheme, a person is given the task of passing some item on, assured that it is safe, but in reality, it is detonated remotely. This technology was tested back in the 1980s, when explosives were hidden in books or children’s toys. The methods by which Nezalezhnaya [Ukraine’s nickname for ‘independent’] recruits suicide bombers differ little from the practices of Islamic terrorist organisations. “There is no difference,” Professor Andrei Manoylo of Moscow State University told journalists. “In some cases, they play on religious motives, in others — on fear, or use blackmail. It is all the same set of tools. People may not even know what they are getting into.” The expert believes that the recourse to the practice of using suicide bombers indicates a deep crisis in Ukraine. Kiev is banking on terror.

By Lyudmila Gladkaya