Metro massacre
Manhunt for bearded bomber who killed 11 after bag packed with shrapnel blew up on St Petersburg train
A MASSIVE manhunt was under way in Russia last night for a ‘briefcase bomber’ who killed at least 11 people and injured 40 more in a ruthless attack on St Petersburg’s subway.
A grainy CCTV image of the bearded prime suspect – wearing a long, black top and a hat – was released as detectives tried to establish whether the bomber was acting alone or part of a terror cell.
The blast happened after a device packed with shrapnel was left on a packed train on the city’s metro. Witnesses described a man leaving a briefcase on a carriage before moving to another one, just seconds before the huge blast.
officials confirmed a second unexploded device was later found at another station nearby and deactivated.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the atrocity, which happened while Russian President Vladimir Putin was visiting the city. But supporters of Islamic State celebrated the attack as revenge for the Syrian air strikes by Russia. Russia has been the target of attacks by Chechen militants in recent years and further attacks have been threatened.
Prime minister dmitry Medvedev said in a Facebook post that the explosion was a ‘terrorist attack’.
Pictures posted on social media showed the door of a Metro train that had been blown out in the blast at about 2.30pm local time.
other images showed passengers lying on the ground of a station platform.
Children were reported to be among those wounded in the outrage, the latest in a string of attacks on Russia’s public transport system in recent years.
Initial reports suggested two explosions, but it was later confirmed there was a single blast.
The explosion happened on a train that was travelling between the Sennaya Ploshchad and Tekhnologic hesky Intitut stations, officials said. Bloodied passengers were left strewn across the platform as emergency services scrambled to save those wounded by the bomb and the resulting shards of glass and twisted metal.
Mr Putin was in St Petersburg for talks with the president of Belarus. The Kremlin leader, who according to reports was not allowed to visit the scene for security reasons, said: ‘The causes are not clear, it’s too early.’
Russian media outlets published the grainy photo which showed an image of the prime suspect, a middle-aged man who entered Petrogradskaya station 20 minutes before the blast. A woman who was near the explosion said: ‘People were lying down, all black, scary, with a horrible smell of burned flesh.’
A woman travelling in the carriage next to the blast described the moment the explosion ripped through the train.
The woman, named only as Polina, said: ‘There was a deafening bang, then a strong smell and smoke. People were pressed against each other.
Two women immediately fell unconscious. Everything happened on the move, the train didn’t stop.’ She said that when the train finally pulled into the station, she ‘saw that the neighbouring carriage was mangled, windows were broken, there was no light and there was blood’.
Health minister Veronika Skvortsova said 11 people had died and that around 40 people were hurt.
St Petersburg, Russia’s secondlargest city with more than 5million residents, is the country’s most popular tourist destination.
The Foreign office currently warns of ‘a high threat from terrorism’ in Russia, and says ‘further attacks are likely’. Russia has a history of attacks on public transport. In 2013, two bomb blasts in two days in the south-western city of Volgograd left more than 30 people dead and 62 needing hospital treatment.
Three years earlier, at least 38 people died in a double suicide bombing on the Moscow metro. And in 2009, a bomb exploded on a high-speed train between Moscow and St Petersburg, killing 27 and injuring another 130.
All the attacks were claimed by Islamist groups.
‘There was a deafening bang’