MOSCOW, February 26. /TASS/. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has foiled an attempt to carry out a terrorist attack on military intelligence (GRU) officers and railway passengers in Moscow that members of the Islamic State terror group (outlawed in Russia) were plotting, Kommersant reported, citing sources involved in the investigation.

"One of the Islamic State leaders, Todzhiddin Nazarov (also known as Abu-Usama Noraki), who, from overseas, had engineered terrorist attacks in Sweden and Tajikistan and personally oversaw them, planned to carry out two similar attacks in Moscow. Nazarov ordered his accomplices to blow up military servicemen deployed to the GRU headquarters on Khoroshevskoye Highway and attack railway passengers. However, FSB officers managed to zero in on and detain the soon-to-be attackers," the newspaper wrote, adding that Nazarov was still at large.

TASS reported earlier that three members of a subversive group set up by Nazarov - Bakhtiyer Makhmudov, Zafarkhon Rakhmatov and Ruslan Bashirov - were conspiring to carry out explosions on the Moscow Central Circle line and in a shopping mall in the capital's suburban town of Balashikha. Law enforcement officials detained them in December 2017, one day before the planned attacks. On February 11, 2019, the three were given sentences of 11 to 15 years behind bars in a maximum-security penal colony. Detectives found out that Bashirov had been expected to carry out a bomb blast in the Balashikha’s Edelveis shopping mall on December 12, 2017, while Makhmudov and Rakhmatov had planned to blow up a commuter train between the Shelepikha and Ploshchad Gagarina stations, throw grenades at it and gun passengers down. After the verdict was delivered, a state prosecutor said that the convicts had also been engaged in IS recruitment activities.

Head of the FSB Military Counterintelligence Department Colonel General Nikolai Yuryev said in an earlier interview with TASS that over the previous five years, security agencies had thwarted four potential terrorist attacks and six terror-related crimes in the army, and shut down 25 terrorist and extremist groups.