Since the beginning of the year, Russian law enforcement agencies have foiled 39 terrorist attacks and eliminated 49 terrorist cells, whose members had planned to carry out attacks in various regions of the country, Director of Russian Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov said.
"This year, 39 terrorist attacks were prevented at the preparation stage, 32 militants were neutralized, 679 were detained, and 22 are inclined to abandon terrorist activity," he said at a conference for heads of intelligence services, security services and law enforcement bodies of FSB partner nations in Sochi.
Bortnikov added that as many as 49 terrorist cells, planning to conduct attacks in various regions across Russia, have been eliminated in 2019, Sputnik reported.
He added that about 7,000 people have been killed or wounded in terrorist attacks across the globe in 2019 alone.
"More than 1,500 attacks, which left about 7,000 people dead or wounded, have been carried out across the globe in 2019 alone," he said.
Bortnikov said that over 43,500 people involved in terrorism have been included in the international counterterrorism database created on the initiative of the FSB, while a third of them are militants that fought in hotspots.
According to him, currently, the database "includes data on 116 terrorist organizations and 43,500 persons." "Nearly a third of them are foreign terrorist militants," the FSB chief noted.
Bortnikov offered his colleagues from special services to use the database as one of the means of supporting counterterrorism activity. Forty-seven special services from 36 countries have access to the database by now, along with eight departments within international organizations, including the UN, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and Interpol.
Among the goals of security cooperation, Bortnikov listed uncovering the plans of heads of terrorist organizations, determining the main routes of transporting foreign militants and their gathering places and obtaining information on every criminal, including their online profile. He added that the exchange of information must be carried out in real time.
He also called on the security services to detect commercial enterprises under the control of terrorists and to eliminate terrorist financing schemes via the Hawala system.
The head of the Russian Federal Security Service has highlighted the unwillingness of IT companies to cooperate with special services in cybersecurity as a serious issue, as messenger services are the main communication tool between criminals.
"With its global coverage, the Internet is becoming the main platform for promoting the ideology of terrorism, recruitment and dissemination of information on ways to carry out terrorist attacks. Online messengers with a high level of cryptosecurity are still the main means of communication between criminals," Bortnikov said.
"In this regard, we see the unwillingness of several leading IT companies to cooperate with special services in the sphere of information security as a serious issue," he stressed.
According to him, currently, there is a rising threat of terrorists using wireless networks that do not depend on cellular service or Internet access when carrying out terrorist attacks.
"In cooperation with Russia's Prosecutor General and Roskomnadzor [the FSB] blocked access to over 8,000 internet resources that [contained information] directed toward destruction [terrorism]," the FSB director said.
The Federal Security Service has identified more than 5,000 Russian nationals who travelled to hotspots to fight alongside terrorists, according to the FSB director. "More than 5,000 Russian citizens who travelled abroad to take part in the fighting alongside terrorists have been identified," Bortnikov said.
Criminal cases have been opened against almost 4,000 of them based on the obtained evidence.
