MOSCOW, December 26. /TASS/. Secretary of Russia’s Security Council Nikolay Patrushev has said that calls on bombs allegedly planted in 2,500 facilities in Russia had been received from "telephone terrorists" in the United States, Ukraine, Turkey and Japan.
"About one million people have been evacuated from more than 2,500 facilities across Russia since September because of hoax bomb calls," he said in an interview with Russia’s Argumenti i Fakty newspaper. "Fake bomb calls were received in 75 regions of Russia." The investigation showed that the overwhelming majority of calls came from abroad via IP telephony, in particular, from Turkey, Ukraine, the US and Japan," Patrushev added. "That was why we intensified cooperation with our foreign partners to pool efforts to search for and bring to justice those involved in such crimes."
Speaking about cooperation between intelligence services, he recalled the terror attack in St. Petersburg prevented with the help of the US special services." "For their part, Russia’s intelligence agencies, after obtaining data on terrorist threats against the US and other countries, are always ready to hand it over to their foreign counterparts," Patrushev assured.
According to the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, calls on bombs allegedly planted in public places are basically aimed at intimidating the population and creating conditions for destabilizing the situation in the country as well as checking whether government agencies are ready to respond to such challenges. "It is impossible not to react to telephone threats, because real threats can be hidden in the avalanche of fake bomb calls," he noted. "The core task of law enforcement agencies and intelligence services is to prevent a terror attack, so they have to handle every such call.".