Russia attack: Kyrgyzstan releases name of suspect in St Petersburg metro bombing

Russia's health minister says death toll from Monday's subway blast has risen to 14

A still image of the suspect walking at St Petersburg's metro station (Reuters)

Kyrgyzstan has released details of the man it believes carried out an attack on the St Petersburg metro.

The country's State Committee for National Security released a statement saying it believed a Kyrgyz-born Russian citizen it identified as Akbarzhon Dzhalilov, or Jalilov, was behind the bombing.

Interfax news agency said authorities believed the 22-year-old suspect was linked to radical Islamist groups.

Russia's state investigative committee said the bomb may have been detonated by a man whose body parts were found in one of the train carriages. It was not immediately clear if its statement related to the man named by Kyrgyz authorities.

"It has been ascertained that an explosive device could have been detonated by a man, fragments of whose body were found in the third carriage of the train," the committee, which has sweeping powers, said in a statement.

It also said it believed Jalilov was responsible for the attack.

His pages on the Russian equivalent of Facebook show Jalilov'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.

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 Jalilov 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 Jalilov had never lived there, but that he had granted him with a temporary registration at the flat as a favour to some mutual acquaintances.

Jalilov'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 Koran, and another called IslamHouse.com, which said it aimed to help people get to know Islam.

Another VKontakte page which belonged to Jalilov included links to a site featuring the sayings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century preacher on whose teaching Wahabbism is based.

On Tuesday Russia's health minister revised the death toll from the bombing to 14. Forty-nine people are in hospital. And four metro stations were cordoned off on Tuesday morning following a new bomb threat, but have since re-opened.

Additional reporting Reuters