St. Petersburg bomb suspect identified as 22-year-old born in Kyrgyzstan

Russian investigators say the man who carried out Monday’s bomb attack on the St Petersburg metro is 22-year-old Akbarzhon Jalilov, the Guardian reports.

Earlier on Tuesday, the intelligence agency of the former-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan named Jalilov as the prime suspect and said he was a native of Kyrgyzstan but had lived in Russia for six years and had taken Russian citizenship.

Russia’s investigative committee said the 22-year-old detonated the bomb in the carriage, and added that his DNA had been found on an unexploded device left at a second metro station, and that this along with CCTV footage led them to believe the same person was behind both attacks.

The statement did not confirm that Jalilov had died in the blast, but earlier, Russian investigators said they believed the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber, based on some of the body fragments they found at the scene.

Russia’s health minister raised the death toll from 11 to 14 on Tuesday and said 49 people were still in hospital. She said 11 people had died at the scene, one died while being transported by ambulance and a further two died in hospital.

The naming of Jalilov brings to an end 24 hours of unsubstantiated rumours about the alleged perpetrator. A Kazakh man named by some media outlets as a potential suspect overnight appears to have been one of the victims, while a man whose photograph was widely circulated by Russian media on Monday went to police to state his innocence.

News agencies reported that Jalilov had lived in Russia for six years and was from the city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. There are hundreds of thousands of central Asians living in Russia, who often work on construction sites in poor conditions, sending the money they earn to their families back home.