Explosives found during police raid

Bomber executed amateurish attack: experts

ST PETERSBURG, April 6, (RTRS): Russian authorities raided a residential building in St Petersburg on Thursday and found explosives similar to those used by a suicide bomber who this week blew up a metro carriage killing 14 people, two security sources said.

The discovery of the explosives raises the possibility that a string of bomb attacks was being planned in the city involving a group of plotters.

The explosives were discovered when security officials raided an apartment building in the city. They detained several people, according to a neighbour who saw the detentions taking place.

Russian investigators said they had detained several suspected accomplices of Akbarzhon Jalilov, born in mainly Muslim Kyrgyzstan, who is the suspected bomber in Monday’s metro blast.

It was not immediately clear if the suspected accomplices were the same people detained at the apartment building.

Security officials searching the apartment complex where the men were detained also found an explosive device there. Bomb disposal experts made the device safe after evacuating people living in apartments on two stairwells.

“We were told: the house is mined, get out quickly,” one woman, who only gave her name as Tatiana and lives in the building, told Reuters.

Another resident, who gave his name only as Anatoly, said he had seen police detain four young men occupying an eighth floor apartment next to his own. Vasily, another neighbour, said that “many people” had lived in the apartment and the detainees looked to be around 30.

The two security sources said that the explosives discovered at the building, in the east of the city, bore similarities to a bomb which was found on Monday inside a fire extinguisher at St Petersburg’s Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station.

That bomb did not detonate. State investigators said they believed the device had been left at Ploshchad Vosstaniya by Jalilov before he went on to another part of the subway network and detonated another bomb he was carrying.

One of the security sources said the explosives found in the apartment building on Thursday was “was exactly like” the unexploded bomb found at the metro station. A second security source said that the quantities of explosives at the apartment and in the unexploded bomb were similar.

Russian is still reeling after the Monday attack which took place on the day Russian President Vladimir Putin was visiting St Petersburg, his home city.

Renewed

The attack has put renewed focus on the large number of emigres from mostly Muslim central Asian states, who have moved to Russia to work.

Meanwhile, the Russian suicide bomber who killed 14 people in an attack on a St Petersburg metro train conducted an amateurish, semi-bungled operation, probably with guidance but no direct support from outside backers, five security experts who reviewed publicly available evidence from the blast site told Reuters.

That unexploded bomb, according to the experts who reviewed a photograph of it in Russian media, was a low-tech homemade device, made locally with sugar and other readily available ingredients, and an improvised, non-commercial detonator.

This lack of sophistication points to a person, or persons, operating with limited resources but some guidance as to how to assemble an explosive similar to the kind used by militant groups such as Islamic State, the experts said.

That supports the theory that Russia is facing a new kind of threat, from violent Islamists who blend into society and are not part of established jihadi groups, and are therefore much harder for security agencies to track down.

“It suggests they were a fairly amateur organisation that wanted to do something but didn’t have the contacts, money or the wherewithal to go and get some high-grade explosive,” said a former Western defence official with experience of working with improvised explosive devices in the Middle East.

The Western official and other people interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity due to the ongoing investigation into Monday’s attack.

A Russian security service officer said the bomb was made using methods brought to Russia from Syria, and the explosive was known as “chocolate” because of its brown colour.

“In contrast to the typical mixtures previously made (in Russia), Islamic State use sugar and the explosive has this earthy colour,” he said, adding that it was likely “other people” were behind Jalilov’s actions.

Russian media have cited law enforcement officials as saying Jalilov had radical Islamist links, raising the possibility that his attack was inspired by Islamic State, which has never struck a major Russian city.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, the state body leading the investigation, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

So far, no-one has claimed responsibility for the blast, but Russia has been on alert for attacks in response to its actions in Syria, where it is supporting troops loyal to President Bashar alAssad against Western-backed armed groups as well as hardline Islamists.

Islamic State has repeatedly threatened revenge and been linked to attacks elsewhere in Europe. If it is confirmed that the metro attack was linked to radical Islamists, it could provoke anger among some Russians at Moscow’s decision to intervene in Syria, a year before an election which President Vladimir Putin is expected to win.