Russia detains 140 suspected Islamic extremists
Moscow: Russian police and security agents detained 140 people at a mosque in Moscow on Saturday on suspicion of involvement with Islamic extremism. A statement from the Federal Security Agency reported by Russian news agencies said among those detained were 30 citizens of unspecified foreign countries. The detentions come a week after the two suspects in the fatal Boston Marathon bombings were identified as Russian-born ethnic Chechens who sympathised with Islamic extremists. There were no immediate reports of charges being filed. The reports cited the agency as saying the mosque previously has been visited by people who had been involved in preparing or carrying out terrorist attacks. A Chechen separatist insurgency that began in the 1990s increasingly took on a fundamentalist Muslim character and spread to neighbouring Russian Caucasus regions, including Dagestan, where Boston bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and their family lived for a period before emigr