The Moscow City Court Recognized ACTO as a Terrorist Organization.

On June 28, 2013, the Moscow City Court approved a claim by the General Prosecutor's Office of Moscow on the barring of the Autonomous Combat Terrorist Organization (ACTO) as a terrorist one.

Readers might recall that on April 12, 2012, the sentence was imposed on 10 members of ACTO (more information here). In July of the same year, the Supreme Court commuted the sentences for 4 out of 10 members of the organization.

According to the law enforcement agency data, members of the group performed eight terrorist attacks against the law enforcement agents and natives of the Caucasus in 2009 – the beginning of 2010. In particular, it is reported that the members of the gang set a trading booth on fire, threw Molotov cocktails at a house inhabited by migrants, set a police station and a cafe on fire, all in 2009. Meanwhile, in 2010, they set on fire a patrol car in the South-Western district of Moscow, a police station near the Tyoply Stan metro station, a trading booth, and blew up a Lexus car, which belonged to an Armenian, in Solntsevo.

General Prosecutor’s Office representative Tatyana Matveev stated that the supervisory authority was asking to recognize the organization as terrorist and bar its activities in order to “show the society that one absolutely cannot fight something using such methods as ACTO’s”.