KYIV. June 13 (Interfax) - The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) believes that the suspected masterminds of the Dnipropetrovsk explosions were also involved in three other attacks in 2011 in Kharkiv, Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk, the Kommersant Ukraine newspaper said on Friday, citing an anonymous SBU source.
According to the inquiry, the mastermind and ideologist of the attacks was a political sciences professor Viktor Sukachyov from the University of Dnipropetrovsk. His motives were allegedly financial.
The suspected masterminds of the April 27 explosions in Dnipropetrovsk - two teachers of political sciences - are also involved in three other attacks that occurred in Ukraine in October-November 2011, the newspaper said. The arrested suspects are cooperating with investigators and are currently being questioned and cross-questioned, according to the newspaper's source.
On October 13, 2011, a blast occurred outside a kiosk in Kharkiv. On October 21, an explosive device went off at a supermarket in Zaporizhia. "A man in a baseball cap and a red jacket, who was seen on the CCTV footage in the Zaporizhia supermarket, was Sukachyov," the SBU source said.
A few weeks later, a reinforced concrete trash container blew up on Karl Marx Avenue in Dnipropetrovsk in the early hours of November 16, 2011, killing one man, a local firm's financial director.
Sukachyov was the organizer of the explosions and subsequent money extortion, the source said. He also convinced the other abettors to take part in the operations, the inquiry says.
"He is smart, competent, well-read and knows how to work with specific software," the SBU said.
When communicating with security officers, the suspects were using anonymizers, which decipher IP-addresses, the source said. To identify their addresses through which communication took place, Ukrainian experts had to ask for help from their counterparts in Russia and the United States.
The user who spoke to security officers went by the nickname Unаbomber (the same nickname is used by notorious terrorist Theodore Kaczynski who sent mail bombs), the newspaper said. In Ukraine, the nickname was presumably used by Sukachyov, and the first message appeared two days after the Dnipropetrovsk explosions on one of the news websites in the form of a comment to the story.
On April 27, 2012, four explosions occurred in a one-hour span in Dnipropetrovsk, injuring 31 people, including 10 teenagers, 26 victims were hospitalized. One victim, a woman, remains in the hospital. All the explosive devices were planted in concrete trash containers.
SBU investigators are probing the criminal case opened by prosecutors on terror charges.
On May 31, senior officials in the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor General's Office stated that two suspects had been arrested for allegedly demanding $4.5 million, otherwise they threatened to continue the explosions. It emerged on June 1 that four people were arrested. All of them have been remanded in custody by the court while the investigation is ongoing.
It was found later that one of them, Sukachyov, is a senior political science professor at the National University of Dnipropetrovsk, and the second one, Vitaly Fedoryak, is an assistant professor of political science.