St Petersburg metro bomber identified as Kyrgyz man

Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security said the man behind the bombing, which killed 14 people, is a Kyrgyz-born Russian national.

Russian president Vladimir Putin lays flowers at a place near the Tekhnologichesky Institut subway station in St Petersburg, Russia. Dmitri Lovetsky / AP Photo

ST PETERSBURG // Russian investigators on Tuesday named the St Petersburg metro bomber as 22-year-old Akbarzhon Jalilov, a Kyrgyzstan-born Russian citizen.

No further details were given but jalilov’s name and year of birth coincided with a statement from the Kyrgyz security services which earlier on Tuesday had identified the bomber as a naturalised Russian citizen originally from Kyrgyzstan.

Russia’s health minister on Tuesday raised the death toll from 11 to 14 and said 49 peoplewere still in hospital. City authorities said there were several foreign nationals among the victims but declined to give further details, but the foreign ministry of Kazakhstan said one of its citizens has been killed in the attack.

The bomb blast tore through a train under Russia’s second-largest city on Monday, a day when president Vladimir Putin was in town, visiting his native city. Within two hours of the blast, authorities had found and deactivated another bomb at another busy station, a major transfer point for passengers on two lines and serving the railway line to Moscow. The bomber was also killed and Russian investigators said traces of Jalilov’s DNA were found on the bag containing the second explosive device.

“The conclusion of genetic evaluation and footage from surveillance cameras enable the investigation to conclude that the man who carried out the act of terror on the carriage was the one who left the bag with the explosive device in the Vosstaniya Square station,” said a statement from investigators. No one had claimed responsibility for the attack, but authorities believe the bomber was linked to radical groups and carried the explosives on to the metro train in a rucksack.

In the past two decades, Russian trains and planes have been frequent targets of attack, usually blamed on Islamic militants. The last confirmed attack was in October 2015 when ISIL militants downed a Russian airliner heading from an Egyptian resort to St. Petersburg, killing all 224 people on board.

The entire St Petersburg metro system, which serves a city of five million, was shut down and evacuated but partial service resumed after about six hours.

President Putin joined hundreds of St Petersburgers on Tuesday to lay flowers outside the station near where the blast occurred. Every corner and windowsill at the ornate, Soviet-built Sennaya Square station was covered with red and white carnations.

Four metro stations were closed again on Tuesday due to a bomb threat, but later reopened.

The driver of the train, Alexander Kavernin, 50, who has worked on the metro for 14 years, said he heard the sound of a blast while his train was running, called security and carried on to the next station as the emergency instructions prescribe.

“I had no time to think about fear at that moment,” he said.

The decision to keep moving was praised by authorities as aiding evacuation efforts and reducing the danger to passengers who would have had to walk along the electrified tracks.

Oleg Alexeyev, 53, who trains sniffer dogs for the police, went to the Technological Institute station to lay flowers in memory of those who died nearby.

“I travelled on the same route this morning just to see how it felt and think about life. You begin to feel the thin line about life and death,” he said.

St. Petersburg is home to a large diaspora of migrants from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia fleeing poverty and unemployment in their home countries. While most Central Asian migrants in Russia have work permits or work illegally, thousands of them have received Russian citizenship in the past decades.

Russian authorities have rejected calls to impose visas on Central Asian nationals, reasoning that having millions of jobless men across the border from Russia would be a bigger security threat.

Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, led a service at Moscow’s main cathedral on Tuesday for those killed in the blast.

“This terrorist act is a threat to all of us, all our nation,” he said quoted by the Interfax news agency.

* Associated Press