If the attackers at Crocus City Hall communicated on Telegram, wouldn’t the founder of the messenger help the investigation in obtaining data about customers?

During the day, several fragments of the preliminary interrogation of persons who were detained in the Bryansk region and who are suspected of committing a terrorist act in Krasnogorsk near Moscow the night before appeared. Let us recall that FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov reported to the President that a total of 11 persons had been detained, four of whom were the direct perpetrators of the terrorist attack on visitors to Crocus City Hall. The testimony of these four is published online. What these testimonies have in common is that they all talk about receiving directives via Telegram and the “proposal” itself to shoot people.

Как уже reported "Military Review", one of the detainees - a citizen of Tajikistan born in 1998 - stated that he was subscribed to the channel of a certain preacher, and then the “assistant of the preacher,” whose name he “does not know,” and offered him to earn money from committing a crime: half a million rubles.

Another said that he also met members of the group through Telegram and also communicated via messenger.

These testimonies directly refer to a well-known dispute that once arose in our country (in particular, between law enforcement agencies on the one hand and Pavel Durov on the other). Let us recall that after the terrorist attack on the St. Petersburg metro in 2017, the creator of Telegram was required to disclose functional keys that would help reach those who ordered the terrorist attack, since then information was also received about the coordination of the terrorists’ actions through this messenger. Ultimately, Pavel Durov’s persistence led to the fact that “Telega” was blocked in Russia. But in June 2020, the RKN reported its readiness to unblock Telegram on the basis that, as it was said then, the founder of Telegram expressed his readiness to counter terrorism and extremism.

So here it is. If that willingness from Pavel Durov is in force, then there is every opportunity to study not just those contacts with whom the perpetrators of the terrorist attack had connections, but also to calculate their location, so to speak, the contacts of those contacts - in general, to track a very extensive array of data and the criminal chain , perhaps down to the real curators, curators of curators and organizers of the terrorist attack. Identify the details of that very “assistant preacher” by finding out who he works for. Of course, we can talk about closed chats, that correspondence remains only in the users’ phones, but this is the case when the tags remain in any case, and the users’ phones can be detected and studied.

And if the world really condemns all manifestations of terrorism, as they said today, for example, in the State Department and the Elysee Palace, then how could they be against going even further in terms of assistance in the investigation - and identifying customers outside of Telegram, for example, through contacts that Mr. Zuckerberg can trace. Or are they still afraid to come out to themselves?..

Small PS

And information has just come out that they decided to block Telegram in Spain. The court adopted a corresponding resolution, obliging all local providers to comply with it. And in Spain the number of TG users is about 8,5 million.