Russians defuse bomb, hold 3 people
Device found during raids days after suicide attack on St. Petersburg metro train
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Russian security services disarmed an explosive device and detained eight people Thursday in a suicide attack on a metro train that killed 13 people Monday.
The investigative committee, which is leading an inquiry into the bombing, said in a statement that six men were detained in St. Petersburg and two in Moscow.
It said the explosive device, found in an apartment in St. Petersburg, was identical to the one the suicide bomber, Akbarzhon Dzhalilov, planted at the Vosstaniya Square station before he blew himself up between the Sennaya Square and the Technology Institute stations. The bomb at the Vosstaniya Square station was disarmed by a security officer before it could detonate.
It was unclear whether Dzhalilov acted alone or was part of a terrorist organization, or whether the people detained Thursday belonged to a militant organization.
The Investigative Committee, which is leading the inquiry, said it had traced several other Central Asians who were in touch with Dzhalilov, but it declined to indicate whether those people were connected to the raids Thursday, saying in a statement only that “valuable objects were discovered during searches in their apartments.”
The news added to an already tense atmosphere in St. Petersburg, the second- biggest city in Russia.
Investigators discovered tinfoil, double- sided tape and other components of explosive devices in an apartment Dzhalilov rented in northeastern St. Petersburg, but there has been little to explain what turned a 22- yearold Russian with Uzbek roots into a suicide bomber, officials said.
Dzhalilov had lived in St. Petersburg since 2011, after obtaining Russian citizenship through his father. Previously, he lived in the city of Osh, in southern Kyrgyzstan, a region that has been the site of interethnic clashes between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz.
Many militants who have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State extremist group or other militant groups have come from Osh, and an investigator told Kommersant, a Russian business daily, that Dzhalilov could have fallen under the influence of one of the terrorist organizations in Syria that has recruited Uzbeks.
Dzhalilov went to Kyrgyzstan in February, and from there tried to travel to Syria by way of Turkey, the newspaper reported. The investigators found burned sugar among the bomb components, a sign that Dzhalilov may have been trained by the Islamic State in Syria, Fontanka. ru reported.
After moving to St. Petersburg, Dzhalilov worked in a sushi bar and at a car- repair shop with his father, Fontanka. ru reported. Dzhalilov’s movements over the past two years, however, are something of a mystery. He stopped using his social media accounts, where links to Islamist websites were among the few traces of his radicalization.
On Wednesday night, several dozen young people went to Marsovo Field, a vast square in central St. Petersburg that offers views of several famous city monuments. After a moment of silence, they assembled candles that together read “14: 40,” the time the bomb exploded Monday as a train traveled between two stations in the heart of the city.
“Such horrible acts have never happened in St. Petersburg, so for me it was a great shock, and I immediately came up with the idea,” said Pyotr Dorosheev, 26, the organizer. “We wanted to show that nothing can break St. Petersburg.”
Pro- Kremlin organizations announced that a series of rallies would be held in major cities, including Moscow, in what critics said was an effort to use the metro bombing to divert attention from the large anti- corruption protests that swept across Russia at the end of March.
In Moscow, City Hall quickly gave permission for a rally Thursday in Manezhnaya Square, a site next to the Kremlin that is usually heavily guarded by the police.