Officials identify Russia’s attacker as 22 year old citizen
Reports from Cable News Network have indicated that the perpetrator of the St. Petersburg Metro Station Bomb Blast is a Russian citizen.
CNN reports that the suspect in Monday’s train explosion in St. Petersburg, Russia, which killed almost a dozen people and injured several, has been identified by Kyrgyz security services, as Akbarjon Djalilov, a Kyrgyzstan national born in 1995.
Latest developments:
The explosion took place between the Sennaya Ploshchad and Tekhnologichesky Institut stations.
The two city center stations have been reopened.
A three-day mourning period has started.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, which led to the shutdown of the city’s metro system.
11 people were killed and 51 people were injured in attack, according to CNN affiliate RBC.
Four of the injured are in critical condition, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said, according to Tass.
According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting with security and law-enforcement services on Monday where he was informed about preliminary results of the investigation over the metro blast, state-run Tass news agency reported.
Putin, who had been in St. Petersburg earlier in the day, laid roses at one of the memorials Tuesday.
US President Donald Trump spoke briefly with Putin on Monday, expressing his condolences in the wake of the terror attack and offering assistance in the investigation.
A second, larger device was found and defused at another station, Russia’s Anti-Terrorism Committee said.
That device, hidden in a fire extinguisher, was larger than the one that went off, according to state media reports quoting law enforcement. It carried about a kilogram of TNT, the reports said.
Surveillance cameras captured pictures of the supposed organiser of the blast, Interfax reported. “Images of the suspected organiser of the metro blast were captured on metro station cameras,” the source was reported to have said.
The explosive device might have been left in a briefcase on a train carriage, the same source told the Russian news organisation.
Vladimir Putin, who was in the city at the time of the attack, said that officials hadn’t yet found a motive but that they would look at a terror attack “first of all”. Isis supporters have been praising the attack, but neither that group or any other has publicly claimed responsibility for it.
The unidentified explosive device went off at 2:20 p.m. on a train that was leaving the Technology Institute station and heading to the Sennaya Square station, the agency said.
Culled from CNN and Independent UK
