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The trouble with terrorist attacks is that these could be in house like 9/11 or the London train bombing using patsies for whatever agenda that particular state wishes to carry out. The general public will never really know the truth, it can only speculate one way or another

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You are quite correct, Sarah. It is possible to "in house" manufacture terror events for specific political outcomes. You cite two such events for which there is strong evidence that this is what was done.

My approach to understanding these events, like for other crimes, is to use the methodology for police investigations: means, motive, opportunity. This methodology can be used to winnow down a list of potential suspects to a workable list. In the case of the Crocus Hall attack, any nation with a developed military intelligence organisation, including Russia, has the means. Russia obviously has the opportunity, in fact, the easiest of all. Others like CIA/MI-6 (or CI-6 as I like to name/merge them) also have this opportunity. It is easier for them if they have Russian speaking and ethnic Slav agents, which they do.

Motive distinguishes them. Before carrying out an activity like this a rational actor will consider the consequences of being discovered. For Russia, this would be catastrophic. For CI-6 acting through a proxy one can assume that this would not be good, but acceptable.

One should also consider local Russian suspects. Are there local grievences? Who owned the building? Who was performing? Were there any particularly important people there? etc. etc. etc. I do not know these details, but merely mention that jumping straight to international actors without assessing local conditions can blind one to potential suspects.

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If you're interested, Alex Christoforou reports on some developments. It looks like the attack may have been mean to occur on the 8th or 9th, when very popular Russian singer Shaman was performing there. This is just after the issuence of the US+UK travel alert of March 7th. Police presence for that concert seems to have been too strong for an effective operation, so it was postponed. This is partially speculative, but the pieces of investigation are starting to come together.

"Terrorist photographed at Crocus on March 7. 'Unprovoked' narrative at risk. Elensky video in bunker", Christoforou, 2024-03-24

$ yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbAHM3cVXo

$ play

# :-)

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