Special services around the world should search for new and more effective means of preventing terrorist attacks, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday.
"Terrorism is the most terrible threat of modern times," Medvedev said in an address to representatives of foreign special and law enforcement agencies, partners of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), who gathered for a meeting in St. Petersburg. "Today, we should search for new, more effective methods of preventing terror."
Special services should "react harshly to the igniting of inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatred and propaganda of violence and extremism, particularly in the global information sphere," the president said.
During the meeting, FSB head Alexander Bortnikov proposed his colleagues to create an expert working group to develop joint mechanisms that would allow revealing terrorist threats in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games due in Russia's Black Sea resort city of Sochi.
The talks in St. Petersburg involve more than 90 delegations from 63 countries, as well as representatives of the United Nations, the European Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
