Explosives found as suspects held after St Petersburg apartment raid
Print Edition
RUSSIAN authorities raided a residential building in St Petersburg yesterday and found explosives similar to those used by a suicide bomber who blew up a metro carriage earlier this week killing 14 people, security sources said.
The discovery raises the possibility that a string of bomb attacks was being planned in the city involving a group of plotters.
The explosives were found when security officials raided an apartment building in the city and, according to a neighbor, detained several people.
Investigators said they had detained several suspected accomplices of Akbarjon Djalilov, born in mainly Muslim Kyrgyzstan, who is thought to have been the bomber responsible for Monday’s metro blast.
It was not immediately clear if the suspects 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. Bomb disposal experts made it safe after evacuating people living in apartments nearby.
“We were told: the house is mined, get out quickly,” one female resident said.
Another resident said he had seen police detain four young men occupying an eighth-floor apartment next to his own. Another neighbor said “many people” had lived in the apartment and the detainees looked to be around 30 years old.
The security sources said the explosives discovered at the building, in the east of the city, bore similarities to the bomb which was found inside a fire extinguisher at St Petersburg’s Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station on Monday.
That bomb did not detonate. State investigators said they believed the device had been left at Ploshchad Vosstaniya by Djalilov before he went on to another part of the subway network to detonate another bomb he was carrying.
One of the security sources said the explosives found in the apartment building yesterday were “exactly like” the unexploded bomb found at the metro station. A second source said the quantities of explosives at the apartment and in the unexploded bomb were similar.
St Petersburg is still reeling from the attack which took place on the day Russian President Vladimir Putin was visiting his home city.
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.
Russia’s state investigative committee, a body with sweeping powers that is looking into the bomber’s background, said in a statement it was also looking into the backgrounds of people it suspected of being accomplices.
It said it had identified several people of central Asian origin who had been in touch with Djalilov, the main suspect. A search of the suspects’ homes turned up objects important for the investigation, it said.
None of the detainees’ neighbors said they had ever seen Djalilov, who was born in Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan but held a Russian passport.
Kyrgyz authorities have so far failed to find evidence of links between Djalilov and Islamist radicals, according to sources in the capital, Bishkek, and in Osh. They could not confirm a report that Djalilov tried to cross into Syria via Turkey in February after a visit to Osh.
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