TULA, March 25 (RAPSI) – The Kursk Regional Court has sentenced a local man to six years in prison for planning to use airplanes in a terrorist attack, the regional prosecutor's office announced.
“The defendant planned to hijack several An-2 single-engine biplanes for a terrorist attack,” the statement reads. Suicide pilots were to fly these planes into densely populated buildings – a local administration building, the police station or an outdoor market – in Zheleznogorsk.
The potential terrorist also drafted an address to the authorities, which he planned to post online after the attack “to demand that the struggle against militants in the North Caucasus be stopped and that Russia's constitutional system be changed.”
The defendant asked a Kursk resident to find a flight instructor and pilots for him. But the man took the information to the Kursk Region department of the Federal Security Service (FSB), which, as it turned out, already had the alleged terrorist under surveillance.
According to the prosecutor's office, the Kursk Regional Court found the defendant guilty of planning a terrorist attack and attempts to recruit others to take part in his criminal plans. The court sentenced him to six year in a high-security prison.