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Leader of group planning terrorist attacks in Moscow arrested

According to the FSB, the so-called Islamic Party of Turkestan ordered the group to commit blasts in Moscow on May 9

Federal Security Service (FSB) officers detained the leader of a terrorist group, Yulai Davletbayev, 42, outside Moscow on Thursday. Immediately after the detention, the court placed him under arrest on suspicion of organization of terrorist attacks. According to the FSB, the so-called Islamic Party of Turkestan ordered the group to commit blasts in Moscow on May 9.

A member of the group, Robert Amerkhanov, who was detained earlier, said that their leaders, supposedly from Afghanistan, had given an assignment to the group to stage a series of explosions in Moscow, the Moskovsky Komsomolets writes. According to Amerkhanov, the leader of the group was Yulai Davletbayev, a native of Sterlitamak, Bashkiria. He began to work as a taxi driver in Moscow to go around the city, without drawing attention to him, and find most vulnerable crowded places.

Members of the group are fanatics. They were members of the organization Islamic Party of Turkestan, and after committing a series of crimes in the republics of the Volga region, hid from police for a long time. In 2010, they left for the Afghan-Pakistani zone, where they underwent military training and ideological indoctrination in one of international terrorist organizations, learned blasting specialization and directly participated in attacks against NATO forces, the Komsomolskaya Pravda cited the National Antiterrorism Committee's information centre as saying.

Meanwhile, many analysts are rather skeptical about the organization’s combat capabilities, the Kommersant writes. The Islamic Party of Turkestan, which separated a few years ago from the really powerful and declared in many countries as extremist Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, operates mostly in the Internet. The party sets really grandiose tasks for its supporters, such as unification of entire "Turkestan" in a caliphate, which, according to the party leaders, comprises former Soviet Central Asian republics and China's Uyghur autonomous region, populated mostly by Muslims. However, nothing concrete is known about real undermining activities of the party in the countries.