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Don’t believe the stories about: the people in blue: these are not the secret organizers of the terrorist attack from the FSB, but ordinary concert visitors. An easy OSINT exposure session for those who missed everything - Meduza

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Who are these “men in blue”? And why do we even pay attention to a version that looks like conspiracy theories?

On the second day after the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, a TikTok video from Polish journalist Marcin Rola went viral on social networks. He was not the author of the version about the organization of the attack by the Russian authorities, but simply posted on his account a video filmed by one of the visitors to the Picnic concert at the moment when terrorists burst into the auditorium and opened fire on people. Rola accompanied this with the following comment:

URGENTLY! Terrorist attack in Russia?! A huge number of killed and wounded! The famous building Crocus City Hall in Moscow is on fire. WHO IS BEHIND THIS?

Twitter users saw the answer to the Polish journalist’s question right in the footage he posted. Allegedly, a group of at least four men, dressed in blue jeans and blue sweaters of different cuts and shades, began shouting calls to lock the doors a few seconds before the terrorists burst into the hall. These details were enough to create and promote the version about a secret group of intelligence officers who coordinated the terrorist attack.

It is difficult to say who the original source of the theory was, but here is its comprehensive presentation in one of the first widely circulated “tweets”:

Someone even saw the faces of specific security officials in the blurry footage:

A few more hours later, the version acquired additional details: allegedly at least one member of the secret group was not only present in the Crocus hall on the evening of March 22, but also detained the alleged perpetrators of the terrorist attack in the Bryansk forest early in the morning of March 23. In this case, the “arguments”, in addition to the flowers of the sweater and jeans, were a similar haircut and a watch on the left hand of both men.

Finally, the last (and, perhaps, the only truly suspicious) element of the theory was the express investigation of the Belarusian opposition project NEXTA. Journalists of the publication found a photograph of one of the alleged intelligence officers on the website of a sports center located in the Sosenskoye settlement in Moscow. At the same address, NEXTA found out, is the headquarters of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). In addition, the authors of the material suggested that one of the members of the “blue” group was also presented as a concert visitor who allegedly neutralized an armed terrorist (the authorities and state media did not provide evidence of this episode four days after the terrorist attack).

Of course, the theory was not born out of nowhere: since the late 1990s, Kremlin critics have suspected Vladimir Putin and his circle of involvement in organizing terrorist attacks for political gain. Then, a few days after the explosions of residential buildings in Buinaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, bags of sugar were found in the basement of a house in Ryazan , in which traces of hexogen were also found during examination. In the first hours after the discovery, law enforcement agencies actively began to investigate the incident and look for the people who pawned the bags, but the very next day, then FSB director Nikolai Patrushev (now still the influential secretary of the Russian Security Council) announced that the whole incident turned out to be just an FSB exercise for checking the vigilance of citizens. The expression “Ryazan sugar” has since become a common noun, denoting the “Kremlin trace” in the organization of certain crimes.

As the authors of the Signal newsletter noted , on the day of the terrorist attack in Crocus, traffic to the page about the explosions in Moscow in 1999 on Wikipedia increased more than 200 times. So part of society was obviously waiting for the version of “Ryazan sugar” - and found confirmation of their expectations in the “men in blue”.

And now - the revelation session

In general, it will be very short. Our colleagues conducted their own investigation on the evening of March 26 and convincingly debunked the “men in blue” version. They showed other photographs of members of the mysterious group and learned some details of their biography. OSINT researchers were helped by facial recognition programs in identifying these people.

• The “GRU employee” discovered by NEXTA turned out to be physical education teacher Dmitry Erokhin, Mediazona editor Maxim Litavrin and independent journalist Andrei Zakharov found out.

• Another “special service agent” was de-anonymized by the editor-in-chief of The Insider, Roman Dobrokhotov, and an investigator from the Bellingcat project, Hristo Grozev . According to Dobrokhotov, the man’s name is Dmitry Druzhkov and he is an “oil worker at  VNIIST .”

• Later, this person gave a short interview to TASS, in which he also assured that he had nothing to do with the special services, but was engaged in construction - and attended the concert as an ordinary spectator with his child.

• Litavrin and Zakharov also drew attention to the fact that at another moment from the video recording of the detention of the alleged terrorists one can see the face of a man whom NEXTA and many social network users mistook for a member of the “blue group”, from which it becomes obvious that this is a different person - which is obvious at least by the facial hair of the detainee and its absence on the concert viewer (facial recognition programs also believe that this is a different person).

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