FSB Lawsuit Against Telegram Connected to St. Petersburg Metro Terror Attack

The lawsuit filed by the Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia against the messaging app Telegram is linked to the investigation of the terrorist attack in the St. Petersburg metro in April of this year. In its request, the security agency demanded data to decrypt user communications, but it was not initially disclosed which specific accounts the FSB was seeking access to.

According to the Republic news outlet, the request concerned six phone numbers allegedly used by suspects involved in terrorist activities. Among these were two numbers belonging to the suspected organizers of the St. Petersburg metro attack, the Azimov brothers. At the time the request was sent to Telegram, the Azimovs’ phones had already been in FSB custody for three months, the publication notes.

Case materials indicate that to communicate with a handler from the terrorist organization ISIS (banned in Russia), one of the brothers used not Telegram, but another messenger—WhatsApp.

According to the report, two other individuals from the FSB’s list remain at large and are active Telegram users. The remaining two numbers are not registered with the service: one is linked to WhatsApp and was last active on April 19, while the other was purchased in Dagestan and is not registered with any social network or instant messaging service. That number is currently unreachable.

A source close to the FSB leadership told the publication that, at the time the request was made to Telegram, the Azimov brothers had already been under arrest for three months, and their ISIS handlers were aware of this. The publication’s sources agree that including the Azimovs’ numbers in the request made little practical sense. They believe the numbers were included due to a technical error caused by poor coordination between FSB departments.

The report also notes that Telegram cannot provide the FSB with encryption keys for technical reasons. In “secret chats,” end-to-end encryption is used, meaning the keys needed to encrypt and decrypt messages are not stored on Telegram’s servers but only on the devices of the chat participants.