The attack near Moscow was watched by the mysterious “men in blue”. Speculation abounds about the role of the FSB

Around the terrorist attack in Krasnogorsk on the outskirts of Moscow, a number of theories and accusations are starting to emerge, who is responsible for it or who was behind it. The Belarusian opposition channel Nexta has come up with an analysis in which it claims that the photos of some visitors raise suspicions and correlate the photos with possible agents of the Russian FSB secret service. However, experts specializing in open-source OSINT analyzes strongly dispute the conclusions.

The Crocus City Hall attack left at least 140 dead and nearly 200 injured. It is the deadliest such attack in Russia in a decade. Russian security forces announced on Saturday that they had caught the perpetrators. In total, they reported the arrest of 11 people, including four attackers. Moscow indicated their connection with neighboring Ukraine, but the terrorist organization Islamic State has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attack. Kyiv strongly denied any involvement.

On its Twitter account, the Next channel works with footage from the concert hall itself or from the arrest of the alleged perpetrators. According to Nexta, a number of strange circumstances appear, connecting several people with similar clothes, which, according to Nexta, could be used for identification among members of the secret services, drawing attention to their atypical behavior at the time of the attack and, according to them, to the Kremlin’s “absurd” official version of the attack itself . “We cannot say with 100% certainty that these people are members of the secret services, but we also cannot ignore all the oddities and doubts about this tragedy,” Nexta summarizes its analysis.

However, a number of journalists specializing in the analysis of public sources, including, for example, the founder of the investigative group Bellingcat Eliot Higgins, strongly question Nexta’s findings and refute them as completely inconclusive in this form. “I found one of those who ‘identify’ as an FSB member is just some gym teacher,” former Bellingcat member Aric Toler, who now works for The New York Times, wrote critically on the X social network.

Russian officials, led by President Vladimir Putin, are trying to link the attack to Ukraine, which has denied any involvement, and the West, which warned Moscow of extremist plans days before the event. This American warning was publicly dismissed by Putin as an attempt at intimidation and blackmail.

The attack was claimed by the Afghan branch of the terrorist organization Islamic State, which, according to the media, recruits among migrants from post-Soviet Central Asia. Russian authorities have detained 11 people, including four suspected perpetrators, over the attack. So far, eight suspects have appeared before the court due to the imposition of custody. Seven of them are from Tajikistan, the eighth, who rented an apartment to the alleged attackers, is originally from Kyrgyzstan.