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Souvenir picture photographers exist at basically every event in the world, sometimes you have to go through them when you get in line for the main event. There’s probably a million pictures of other people who were there. It’s not “convenient” it’s a standard picture taken by a guy that works there, very much not some “random photographer”.

There’s a lot of “could have” and “would have been able to” and not a lot of evidence.

It never quite made sense to me how the attackers could enter the building calmly, killed people, committed arson, then fled the scene on a car for almost 400km before they were caught.

I don’t see what’s so incredible about this. It’s quite possible to pull this off at any unsecured venue in the world. Nobody knows who they are in the moment, abandoning your guns and fleeing with the crowd isn’t some monumental task. Terrorists have been on the run for much longer than a few hours. Police aren’t going to be chasing phantom terrorists when they could still be inside the building, and immediately storming the premises isn’t how counterterrorism response works anywhere in the world.

The far less sophisticated Boston marathon bomber got away for much longer than these guys did. It’s not like the movies where you press a button and the computer immediately goes “terrorists located heading on Highway 1 out of the city”

It makes more sense to be an inside job from Kremlin, no?

No, it absolutely does not. Your argument hinges on the belief that everything is too perfect and nothing else.

I’m not saying it’s impossible that it was a false flag - but the evidence doesn’t support it and I take issue with your basis. As we are all stuck in the realm of speculation, the explanation that tracks the most is that American backed pansies carried out the attack.

March 7th… the day the US embassy put out their warning there is a terrorist scoping the place out?

Is the police response that slow?

I mean... yes? A patrol car could respond pretty quickly, but terrorist attacks require specialized units which take time to actually be put into action, and further time to actually figure out the situation, how many militants they're dealing with, and so on - just rushing guys in without a plan can very well make the situation worse, as the Russians themselves painfully learned at Beslan.

The simple reality is, there's no way for the state to actually ensure complete security in a massive metropolitan area without declaring martial law and deploying like, several army corps worth of cops or paramilitaries (which of course has political consequences, and besides, you could just suffer an attack somewhere else anyway). With this incident in particular, I also read reports that there were false shootings/bomb-threats being called in - you can essentially paralyze state security services that way, since they kind of have to respond, but there's no way for them to effectively respond to everything, and so the real attacks can slip through.

Determined terrorists will pretty much always be able to slip through the cracks eventually - it's just that, fortunately, contrary to GWOT-era propaganda, there actually aren't all that many well-equipped groups around to do stuff like that, and they're mostly fighting insurgencies in their own homelands rather than executing attacks in faraway capital cities.

It makes more sense to be an inside job from Kremlin, no?

I'm sorry, but On what do you even base this assumption? What purpose would this loss of life serve as opposed to something more symbolic? Russia doesn't need to justify actions in Ukraine when they're at war and if it was to create support for reaction against Ukraine / NATO (which they don't want to face off with in the latter case) they'd make it ironclad and obvious who that the perpetrators were agents of that state etc. And beyond that, if you are going to do a false flag you don't usually let the assets live and put them on the stand. I don't see anything that points towards some sort of inside job or false flag.

Is the police response that slow?

If you actually read the reporting the attack wasn't long. They fired into crowds and then started a fire with molotovs, which was what caused many of the deaths apparently. They then escaped the building amongst the crowds of fleeing people.

So now you have an attack where thousands of people are fleeing, things like security cameras to identify the suspects are in a burning building, and an attack MO that isn't necessarily what you'd expect (they may have even been assuming the fires were started by suicide bombers for example).

I was reading reporting that the Spetsnaz/GRU headquarters where their militarized emergency response team was for these situations is about 30 minutes away, and that's assuming a unit is geared up and has enough information to make a complete response plan on the way.

Then there's the fact that you have shakey Intel of the suspects, who may have explosives and automatic weapons, possibly still suicide vests etc and it's probably smart not to try and get into a shooting war with them it a busy urban environment even if you can definitely identify and locate them quickly enough. There's a reason you see in the photos and footage of their capture that it's on a rural wooded road. The reporting is clear that once they'd identified them and the car intelligence tracked it while a unit set up and ambush in a remote place so that if it went bad or they decided to detonate themselves or similar the damage would be limited to the suspects and maybe the capture team.

Ukraine/US/NATO is still the most likely scenario given the current info, but I don't think it's time to entirely rule out false flag, either. There's still lots of weird stuff going on, like how quickly all of this info came out and Tajikistan denying that the men who Russia said did the shooting are who the claim to be.