Russia arrests German woman in alleged bomb plot

Russia said Monday it had arrested a German woman found with a homemade bomb in her backpack in what it alleged was a Ukrainian-hatched plot to blow up a security services facility in the south.

Russia has arrested dozens of people throughout the four-year war, mostly its own citizens, on allegations of working for Ukraine to carry out sabotage attacks.

There has been a string of high-profile arrests of Western citizens since Moscow ordered its troops into Ukraine — typically on espionage charges that are widely seen as baseless, with those detained later swapped in exchange for Russians jailed abroad.

Detentions of Western citizens for carrying out or preparing actual attacks are much rarer.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said the woman, born in 1969, had been dragged into the alleged plot by a citizen from a Central Asian country, who was working on orders from Ukraine.

She was detained and found with an improvised explosive device in her bag in the Caucasus city of Pyatigorsk, the FSB said.

The FSB said it had “prevented a terrorist attack planned by the Kyiv regime against a law enforcement facility in the Stavropol region, involving a German citizen born in 1969,” the agency said in a statement.

The FSB said the device — which contained an explosive charge equivalent to 1.5 kilogrammes (three pounds) of TNT — was supposed to be detonated remotely, killing the German woman.

The blast was prevented by electronic jamming, the FSB added.

‘Radical ideology’

A man from an unidentified Central Asian state, born in 1997 and “a supporter of radical ideology”, was found and arrested near the targeted site, it added.

The pair faces life in prison on terrorist charges.

There was no immediate reaction to the allegations in Kyiv or Berlin.

Video footage of the purported arrest published on state media showed armed Russian security agents approach the woman, who was lying face down, dressed in all black, in a car park.

Another video showed masked plainclothes agents pulling a man into a station, followed by a controlled explosion of the backpack.

Officials initially alleged that the perpetrators of a 2024 massacre at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow that killed 150 people were IS members in coordination with Ukraine.

IS claimed responsibility for that attack, making no reference of any Ukrainian involvement, for which no evidence was presented by Moscow and which Kyiv denies.