Moscow. A strange incident casts a dark light on the government’s position. In front of a building on Novoselskaya Street, a white Zigulì car stands, its license plate covered with paper and tape. A nervous-looking girl stands next to it. A bus driver calls the police, who arrive and search the building, at the insistence of the bus driver’s daughter, finding several 50-kg bags marked “sugar” and connected to a detonator. The twelve floors of the building are evacuated. A detector brought to the scene later detects signs of T4 explosives, the same ones used in the other Moscow attacks in the previous days. Three of the suspects loitering around the Zigulì car are later identified and captured: they present documents from the FSB, the Russian secret service, and are immediately released. The government later declares that the bags marked “sugar” contain no real explosives, and that the device that detected T4 had likely malfunctioned. The incident casts a dark shadow over Vladimir Putin that will never be fully erased.
