3 Suspected Terrorists in Detention Pending Moscow Investigation

A Moscow district court ruled on Tuesday to keep three men suspected of plotting a terrorist attack on the capital's public transportation system in jail until Dec. 12, the Mediazona news website reported.

The three suspected terrorists — Mokhmad Mezhidov, Elman Ashayev and Aslan Baisultanov — were part of the group of 12 people who had been detained Sunday and accused of plotting the attack, the report said.

According to investigators, Baisultanov, 25, was ordered to perform the attack in order to persuade Russian authorities to stop the military operation against the Islamic State terrorist organization in Syria. He was given an explosive and a detonator in Grozny, the capital of the republic of Chechnya, which he brought to Moscow together with Ashayev, 23, who has already admitted his guilt.

Baisultanov and Mezhidov stored the explosives in an apartment in western Moscow that was raided on Sunday.

Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), said Tuesday that Baisultanov had arrived in Russia from Syria to perform the attack, the TASS news agency reported. At the same time the investigator in court who introduced a motion to arrest him has never mentioned his arrival from Syria, Mediazona's report said.

Earlier this week some media reported that many of the 12 people detained on Sunday were Syrian, but FSB spokespeople denied it and said all the suspects were Russian, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported.

Several of the detainees had received training from Islamic State militants in Syria and came to Russia “long before” Russia launched an air offensive there, news agency TASS reported earlier.

A criminal case against the group was launched in 2014 in Chechnya, Medi?°zona reported, citing the investigator in the court. It will now be combined with the criminal case launched on Monday in Moscow, the report said.

Russia's National Anti-Terrorism Committee on Sunday reported a group of terror suspects had been detained during a raid on an apartment in western Moscow.

During the raid, officers seized and deactivated a homemade explosive, with a yield of about 5 kilograms of TNT equivalent, the FSB said in their statement, TASS reported.

During interrogations, two of the detainees confessed the group had been planning to stage an attack on Moscow's public transport system, the FSB said in its statement.

The FSB said a criminal investigation had been opened into the case on charges of planning a terrorist act, weapons trafficking and the manufacture of explosives, TASS said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was receiving “constant updates” on the operation, TASS reported.

The explosive was similar to the devices used in attacks in North Caucasus, the Kommersant newspaper reported Tuesday. It was a large bucket full of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder with a cell phone attached to it, the report said. It was to explode from the cell phone's ringing.