Disrupting Escalation Of Terror In Russia To Prevent - Belfer Center ...
Disrupting Escalation Of Terror In Russia To Prevent - Belfer Center ...
Disrupting Escalation Of Terror In Russia To Prevent - Belfer Center ...
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Kosolapov. Kosolapov, an ethnic <strong>Russia</strong>n from the Volgograd region, was expelled from a<br />
Rostov-on-Don military academy in the late 1990s for breaking rules and was later recruited by<br />
Chechens living in Volgograd to fight against federal troops in Chechnya, according to Federal<br />
Security Service investigators. <strong>In</strong> Chechnya, he converted to Islam, received training from Arab<br />
instructors and was picked by Basayev in late 2003 to head a group to carry out terrorist attacks<br />
in <strong>Russia</strong>.<br />
The first attack, which Kosolapov helped to arrange, was the February 6, 2004 suicide<br />
bombing on a train traveling between the Paveletskaya and Avtozavodskaya metro stations in<br />
Moscow, in which some forty passengers perished. Several weeks later, Kosolapov and two<br />
Kazakh citizens blew up four gas pipelines and set mines under three electric gridline poles<br />
outside Moscow, the FSB said. Basayev has claimed responsibility for all of those attacks in<br />
statements posted on the rebel Kavkaz <strong>Center</strong> Web site. The FSB also believes that Kosolapov<br />
organized a bombing at a Samara outdoor market in July 2004, which killed eleven, and two bus<br />
stop bombings in Voronezh in June 2004, which resulted in the death of one man. 42<br />
<strong>In</strong> May 2005, law-enforcers in Voronezh unveiled that they had arrested an ethnic Slav,<br />
who they identified as Maksim Panaryin, on suspicions that he helped to organize the bus stop<br />
bombings in Voronezh in 2004 and was planning to stage another terrorist attack in this city on<br />
Victory Day of this year (May 9, 2005). 43 <strong>In</strong> a statement to the State Duma in May 2005, FSB<br />
director Nikolai Patrushev mentioned Panaryin as among key members of a terrorist group<br />
responsible for at least nine attacks, including the series of explosions in Voronezh in 2004 and<br />
in 2005, the suicide bombings outside Moscow’s Rizhskaya metro station, and on the train<br />
heading to the Avtozavodskaya metro station in 2004. Patrushev said FSB officers have detained<br />
42 Vremya Novostei, January 13, 2005<br />
43 “Prizrak Kosolapova,” Vremya Novostei, May 13, 2005.<br />
18