Moscow: Investigators have named a man who they believe blew up a St Petersburg subway car, killing 14 people in the worst terrorist attack in a major Russian city in years, and said he also planted a bomb found at a second metro station.
The remains of Akbarzhon Dzhalilov, who marked his 22nd birthday on Saturday, were recovered from the scene of Monday's bombing and matched DNA found on a bag containing the other explosive device that was defused at a nearby station, Russia's Investigative Committee said Tuesday. "The conclusion from this genetic material and CCTV cameras give investigators reason to believe that the person who committed the terrorist act in the subway car left the bag with the explosive device" at the second station, the committee said in a website statement.
The suspected suicide bomber was a Russian citizen born in Kyrgyzstan, according to a spokesman for the Kyrgyz government's Committee for National Security, adding that his agency is working with Russian officials on the probe. The Interfax news service quoted the agency as saying that the bomber came originally from the Kyrgyz city of Osh.
Investigators suspect he was linked to radical Islamist groups and carried his improvised device in a backpack. Officials in Kazakhstan said they were cooperating with Russian authorities in the probe, although it wasn't clear if there was an additional suspect from that country. There's been no claim of responsibility for the terrorist attack.
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Eleven people were killed immediately in the blast and three more died later from their injuries, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said, adding that 49 remain hospitalised.
It was 2:40pm local time, a lull before the evening rush hour in Russia's second-largest city, where the subway normally carries 2 million people a day. The train had just entered a tunnel between stations, on its way out of a sprawling downtown hub, when the bomb exploded.
The homemade device, filled with shrapnel, tore through the third car. It spread bloody mayhem as the train limped into the Technology Institute station with smoke filling the air.
Videos circulating on social media showed long red streaks across the white floor as the injured were dragged from the car. With the doors damaged, some people smashed through the windows to get out. "What a nightmare!" somebody yelled amid piercing screams.
With the attack, Russia once again appeared to have found itself a target of terrorism, shattering a respite in its main urban centres. Law enforcement agencies initially said they were seeking two people suspected of planting explosive devices, according to Russian news reports, but later indicated it might have been carried out by a suicide bomber from a militant Islamic group.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but speculation turned toward militants from southern Russia who fled the shoot-to-kill law enforcement policy in Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caucasus and joined the Islamic State group by the thousands and have repeatedly threatened attacks. President Vladimir Putin sent the Russian military to Syria in September 2015 in order, he said then, to battle militants on their own turf before they could strike in Russia.
"If somebody announces that it is related to the Russian invasion in Syria, it would be a sensitive scenario for Putin, because the Syria campaign would lose support inside Russia," said Kirill Rogov, a political analyst, while adding that it was too early to connect the attack to Putin's Syria policy with any certainty.
The dead and wounded had barely been evacuated before the various factions in Russia's heated political sphere began blaming one another.
Nationalists and others on the right pointed the finger at the opposition, saying that such attacks emerged from the same womb as the street protests on March 26, in which tens of thousands of people unexpectedly marched against high-level government corruption. Opposition figures responded that the security forces, feeling vulnerable, were perfectly capable of provoking a crisis in order to expand their powers of search and seizure.
Before the Kyrgyz man was revealed as the suspected suicide bomber, there were also unconfirmed reports that a suicide bomber from Uzbekistan or a neighbouring country might have been responsible, unnerving St Petersburg's Central Asians.
"This will be a stain on us, as though we are criminals," said Rafael Artikov, a 57-year-old Uzbek, standing in front of a makeshift memorial. "The goal was to frighten us and split us into separate groups," he added, lamenting that "people look at me as though I am suspicious".
President Vladimir Putin, who was in St Petersburg at the time of the attack, visited the local Federal Security Service's branch to be briefed by officials and later laid flowers at the site of the explosion. Security was tightened across St Petersburg, a city of 5 million, as well as in Moscow.
Russia's two biggest cities haven't suffered a major attack in more than six years. The Kremlin tightened security after hundreds were killed by terrorist strikes in the early 2000s that were later claimed mostly by Chechen separatists. Since Putin sent forces into Syria in 2015, Islamic State has threatened to strike at Russia, taking responsibility for the downing of a plane carrying Russian tourists from Egypt to St. Petersburg, which left 224 dead.
Bloomberg, New York Times
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