6 arrested for terror in wake of bombing
Russia faces different threat
ST PETERSBURG, Russia, April 5, (Agencies): As the residents of Russia’s second-largest city try to regain their nerve in the wake of a fatal subway bombing, officials announced Wednesday that six people have been arrested on suspicion of recruiting terrorists.
Wednesday’s statement from the Investigative Committee gave few details, but said those arrested came from Central Asian countries that once were part of the Soviet Union. Officials have said the suicide attacker behind Monday’s blast that killed 14 people in St Petersburg was a native of the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan.
There was no immediate information tying those arrested with the suspected bomber, identified as 22-year-old Akbardzhon Dhzalilov. Fifty-five people wounded in the blast remain hospitalized, deputy mayor Anna Mityanina said Wednesday.
The predominantly Muslim Central Asian states are seen as a prime recruiting ground for Islamic militants.
Meeting with the heads of security services from a regional alliance that includes most of Russia’s Central Asian neighbors, President Vladimir Putin warned that terrorism remained a threat to all in the region.
“We see that, unfortunately, the situation is not improving,” he said. “The recent tragic events in St Petersburg are the best confirmation of this. We know that each of our countries, practically every one, is a possible and potential target of terrorist attacks.”
Earlier Wednesday, the Investigative Committee said in a statement they searched the home of Dhzalilov in St Petersburg. They also examined CCTV footage from outside Dhzhalilov’s home which shows him leave home with a bag and a backpack.
The bomb went off on a train under Russia’s second-largest city on Monday. Another bomb, hidden in a bag, was found and de-activated at another St Petersburg station just half an hour before the blast Dhzhalilov’s DNA was found on the bag.
Punishment
After the attack, several Russian politicians have called for ending the moratorium on capital punishment. But parliament speaker Vyacheslav Volodin dismissed the statements as attention-getting devices and upbraided the politicians, saying “One must not use a tragedy to promote oneself.”
Meanwhile, Akbardzhon Dhzalilov, the man suspected of blowing up a Russian metro train, represents a new wave of radical Islamists who blend into local society away from existing jihadist movements — making it harder for security forces to stop their attacks.
His pages on the Russian equivalent of Facebook show Dhzalilov’s interest in Wahabbism, a conservative and hardline branch of Islam. But they give no indication that he might resort to violence, presenting a picture of a typical young man leading a largely secular life.
If radical Islamism was indeed his motive, he will be distinct from two previous waves of attackers — those from Russia’s restive North Caucasus region who fought successive rebellions against Moscow; and a later group who went to Iraq and Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State group.
The new generation may take inspiration or instruction from people involved in those previous fights, and are drawn from the same Muslim communities.
However, they are not directly linked to those militant organisations and have not created the trail of arrest warrants, tapped phone calls, travel documents and monitored border crossings on which security forces usually rely to keep tabs on violent Islamist radicals.
“It’s a completely different kind, a different level of terrorist threat from the one that Russian security services are used to dealing with,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian expert on the intelligence services.
Bombing
Security services typically look for an organisation and financing network behind a terror attack, he said, but those may not exist in cases such as the metro bombing. “It’s very difficult to counter things like this,” Soldatov said.
British police have run into similar problems investigating the case of Khalid Masood, who sped across Westminster Bridge in a car last month, killing three pedestrians and injuring dozens more, before stabbing a policeman to death. Shot dead by police, Masood also had no known links to jihadist groups.
Dhzalilov is typical of millions of young Muslim men living in Russia. There was nothing apparent from his background and lifestyle that made him stand out for the authorities.
An ethnic Uzbek from the southern Kyrgyzstan city of Osh, he moved with his father to St Petersburg for work several years ago, according to neighbours in Osh.
In Russia, he worked with his father as a panel beater in a car repair shop, they said. An acquaintance from St Petersburg said Dhzalilov had worked for about a year in a chain of sushi restaurants. A second acquaintance said he was a fan of sambo, a form of martial arts popular in Russia.
He owned a Daewoo car, according to a source in the Russian authorities, and was registered at an apartment in a quiet, upscale neighbourhood of suburban St Petersburg.
A person who said he was a representative of the apartment’s owner said Dhzalilov had never lived there, but that he had granted him with a temporary registration at the flat as a favour to some mutual acquaintances.
Dhzalilov’s page on VKontake, a Russian social media website, has photographs showing him wearing stylish Western dress, in a restaurant with friends and smoking a hookah pipe. His listed interests included a pop music radio station and mixed-martial arts. His page had a link to the home page of boxer Mike Tyson.
But he also had an interest in religion: the page had links to a website in Russian called “I love Islam” which features quotations from the Holy Quran, and another called IslamHouse.com, which said it aimed to help people get to know Islam.
Another VKontakte page which belonged to Dhzalilov included links to a site featuring the sayings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century preacher on whose teaching Wahabbism is based.
Security officials and people involved in radical Islam say the earlier generations of violent Islamists are now largely out of the picture.