Russian metro blast detainees ‘from Central Asia’
Print Edition
RUSSIA’S security chief yesterday said that all those detained over the St Petersburg metro bombing originate from Central Asia, urging tighter immigration controls.
The eight people detained in Moscow and St Petersburg over the April 3 bombing that killed 13 are “all originally from Central Asia,” the head of the FSB security service, Alexander Bortnikov, was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti news agency.
Bortnikov, speaking at a meeting of the National Antiterrorism Committee that he chairs, did not specify the suspects’ current citizenship.
“To prevent attempts by fighters to enter Russia,” there is a need for “additional measures of control on the state border ... towards those suspected of taking part in terrorist attacks,” the security chief said.
Russia’s border guards are under the control of the FSB.
The country’s Investigative Committee last week named the eight suspects but not their ethnic origin. The suspected suicide bomber has been named as 22-year-old Akbarjon Djalilov, who is thought to be a Russian national born in Central Asian Kyrgyzstan.
Millions of migrants from the poverty-stricken former Soviet countries of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan come to work in Russia.
The core of “terrorist groups in Russia” is made up of citizens of ex-Soviet countries arriving “in flows of migrant workers,” Bortnikov said, adding that some of these had trained and fought in Syria and Iraq.
He linked the St Petersburg attack to the Islamic State jihadist group, which has, however, not claimed responsibility.
Bortnikov cited information according to which “the heads of terrorist groups active in the Middle East as part of IS are working on plans to carry out terrorist attacks in various regions of the world, including Russia.”
“Examples of this are the high-profile terrorist attacks in recent weeks in Britain, Russia, Sweden and Egypt.”
In Sweden, an Uzbek man drove a truck into pedestrians in Stockholm last Friday, killing four and injuring 15.
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