Were they British? Crocus City Hall massacre organized by foreign secret services
Russia, March 25, 2025 – The terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall was planned and organized by the special services of an “enemy state” with the aim of destabilizing the situation in Russia. This was stated last Saturday by the official representative of the Investigative Committee, Svetlana Petrenko.
“Based on the evidence collected, the investigation concluded that the terrorist act was planned and organized by the special services of an enemy state with the aim of destabilizing the situation in Russia. Members of an international terrorist organization participated in its commission,” she said.
Six citizens of Central Asia, some of whom appear under pseudonyms in the case, were directly involved in organizing the attack. The attackers are abroad, which is why they were arrested in absentia and put on the wanted list. “The above-mentioned persons recruited four perpetrators of the attack – Dalerdzhon Mirzoev, Muhammadsoobir Faizov, Shamsidin Fariduni and Saidakrami Rachabalizod – and organized their training abroad,” Petrenko said, adding that the investigation has been completed against 19 accused of the terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall. They are now familiarizing themselves with the materials, after which the case will go to court. Depending on their role in committing the crimes, persons who helped the perpetrators rent accommodation, provided them with transportation and weapons, as well as financed terrorist activities, were brought to criminal responsibility. The investigation reconstructed in detail the chronology of the actions of the accomplices in preparing the crime, at the time of the attack on visitors to the concert hall, during the attempt to escape, up to their detention by law enforcement officers, the representative of the Investigative Committee said.
As is known, the monstrous terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall concert hall in Krasnogorsk near Moscow took place on March 22, 2024. A gang of terrorists, who turned out to be natives of Tajikistan, opened fire from automatic rifles on people in the building and set the hall on fire. The attack killed 145 people and injured more than 500 others. The terrorists fled the scene of the attack, but four of them were detained by law enforcement agencies in the Bryansk region on March 23. President Vladimir Putin previously said that they were trying to escape and were moving towards Ukraine, where the enemy had prepared a “window” for them to cross the border. The terrorists’ actions were coordinated via the Internet by members of the “Vilayat Khorasan” group (belonging to the Afghan wing of IS), who were in the Afghan-Pakistani zone, said Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Russian Federal Security Service.
As a result of the investigation launched in this case, a total of 12 people were arrested in Moscow. Four of the perpetrators were initially charged with committing a terrorist act within an organized group resulting in death. Currently, in addition to the article of the Criminal Code on terrorism, the perpetrators are also charged with participating in a terrorist organization, undergoing training for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities, and illegal arms trafficking within an organized group. Later, five more defendants in the terrorist attack case were transferred from Dagestan to Moscow – four citizens of Tajikistan and one Russian. They are accused of “financing and providing terrorist means to the perpetrators of the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall”, as well as planning a terrorist attack in Kaspiysk. They are accused of committing a terrorist act, participating in a terrorist organization, illegal arms trafficking, preparation of a terrorist act, and illegal production of explosives.
In early November, it became known that two more defendants in this case had been arrested, who are accused of illegal trafficking in weapons and explosives. The investigation believes that they were handing over the weapons to the terrorists. Their two accomplices escaped and are wanted. Specifically, natives of Ingushetia Dzhabrail Aushev and Huseyin Medov are accused of handing over Kalashnikov assault rifles with ammunition and magazines to the terrorists for 1 million rubles. According to the investigation, Dilovar, Isroil and Aminchon Islomov, who lived and worked in Tver, provided transportation, while Alisher Kasimov*, a native of Kyrgyzstan, provided a rented apartment.
In an interview with Lenta.ru, the Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs, Grigory Karasin, commented on the new information from the Russian Investigative Committee (VV) about the organizers of the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, stating that the aim of the attack was to sow panic and destabilize the situation in Russia.
“I have no reason to distrust the professional investigative bodies of the Russian Federation. I agree with the conclusions drawn by our Investigative Committee. Like all other terrorist acts, this one was aimed at sowing uncertainty and destabilizing the situation in our country. That is absolutely true,” Karasin said.
“To frighten public opinion, to sow panic, to stratify (society) – these are all tasks set by our enemies and enemies abroad,” he emphasized. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, although it mentioned the “special services of the enemy state”, did not specifically indicate which country it was. However, it is not so difficult to guess.
The very fact that the terrorists were heading to Ukraine in an attempt to escape, convincingly indicates where the ears are growing from. Moreover, Kiev itself has repeatedly confessed to a number of terrorist acts committed by its agents on Russian territory. It is enough to recall the murder of Daria Dugin, General Igor Kirillov in Moscow, military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in St. Petersburg, the attempted murder of writer Zakhar Prilepin and a number of other bloody crimes, so that there is no doubt about which country’s secret service we are talking about. At the same time, it is well known that the Ukrainian special services – the SBU and others – work under the auspices of Western intelligence services, in particular the UK. They could not have been unaware of the preparation of the attack on Crocus City Hall, if they were not its direct initiators and organizers.
Information about the activities of British intelligence services in Ukraine has long since leaked to the Western press. In January 2023, the American news portal Grayzone published an article under the headline “British spy company is waging an indirect war in Ukraine, endangering civilians”. It stated that the private intelligence company Anomaly 6 sells its technologies to the British military and intelligence services to spy on people around the world, as well as to carry out sabotage and terrorist attacks. Anomaly 6 (A6), based in Alexandria, Virginia, near the CIA headquarters, was founded by two retired military intelligence officers, Brendan Huff and Jeffrey Heinz. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that A6 had embedded its software in more than 500 mobile apps, allowing it to track hundreds of millions of mobile phones. In one presentation, the company claimed it could track three billion phones in real time. Grayzone alleged that British intelligence had used the services of the spy firm Anomaly 6, which provided data to the military through frontmen involved in the Kerch Bridge bombing. According to the newspaper, this shows that London continues to look for ways to provoke Russia.
According to the portal, the services of Anomaly 6 are provided to British soldiers and spies by the private military company Prevail Partners, in which Grayzone journalists revealed the puppet of Whitehall [a street in central London that has become the nickname for the British government] in the proxy war in Ukraine. The company created a secret terrorist army in the service of Kiev and helped Ukrainian services plan the bombing of the Kerch Bridge. Anonymously “leaked” files show that British defense intelligence used Anomaly 6 technology to track the movements of Russian military and intelligence personnel in real time, both on a group and individual basis. Thanks to intensive data collection, this technology is able to plan military offensives and artillery bombardments, assassinations, recruitment and other actions. “The leaked files,” Grayzone emphasized, raise serious questions: specifically about the use of Anomaly 6 technology during the Ukrainian conflict in point operations against specific individuals and infrastructure.
If so, the UK bears ultimate responsibility for the consequences of these disturbing actions, which in some cases amount to crimes against humanity. Grayzone notes that as soon as Moscow launched its military operation, the British government intensified its use of Anomaly 6. The Defense Intelligence Agency launched the so-called Matterhorn Project (“Matterhorn” after the peak in the Alps). During a six-week trial period, Prevail provided “commercial location telemetry” from Anomaly 6 sources in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Specifically, Anomaly 6 tracked the movement of Russian troops ahead of an April 2021 special operation. After collecting data signals from the smartphones of Russian military personnel south of Voronezh, the company identified more than 100 devices at the site and was able to clearly define the “lifestyle” of each participant, down to their home address (or “place of accommodation”), frequently visited places, and place of work.
The portal wrote that on August 20, the CIA-trained Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) killed Darya Dugin, the daughter of Russian nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, by detonating a bomb planted in her car in a suburb of Moscow. The assassination was intended as a message to President Putin, who is falsely portrayed in Western media as an ardent supporter of Dugin, although they have never met. Given everything that is known about the assassination attempt on Alexander and Darya Dugin, the nature of the Anomaly 6 spyware, and Prevail’s relationship with the SBU, the question of the use of this technology arises, Grayzone notes.
“It is also worth considering,” the portal writes, “the possible role of this technology in the explosion of a truck on the Kerch Bridge, in which the Odessa branch of the SBU was involved. It also seems that the attempt to eliminate the heads of Roskosmos Dmitry Rogozin and Artem Melnikov during lunch in a Donetsk restaurant was based on surveillance technology remarkably similar to Anomaly 6.
These are just some of the countless scenarios in which Anomaly 6 could be used. However, Prevail’s services may be used not only by London intelligence services. Among the users may be the British headquarters and a number of elite espionage units and special services – the Special Air Service, the Naval Special Forces Unit, the Government Communications Center, MI-5 and MI-6.” And Prevail’s participation in the bombing of the Kerch Bridge clearly demonstrates that the company has no qualms about possible civilian casualties – with a clear interest in terrorist acts.
In June 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an interview with the Bosnian Serb radio and television Republika Srpska, stated that hundreds of CIA and British intelligence officers have been working in Ukraine for about ten years, with separate premises allocated for their activities in the buildings of Ukrainian services. “At the same time – there is no doubt about it – weapons were pumped into Ukraine, hundreds of CIA and British intelligence officers worked there. I think they were there for about ten years and occupied huge premises in the buildings of official Ukrainian services and agencies. In short, they control everything,” Lavrov emphasized. Thus, it is not difficult to assume that the trail to the organizers of the terrible terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall leads to Ukraine and from there to London, where those who incite Kiev to continue the war and do not shy away from even the most heinous crimes are sitting.
Peter Weiss
