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Russian investigators say suicide bomber attacked St Petersburg subway

President Vladimir Putin, left, lays flowers at a place near the Tekhnologichesky Institut subway station in St Petersburg, Russia PICTURE: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP
President Vladimir Putin, left, lays flowers at a place near the Tekhnologichesky Institut subway station in St Petersburg, Russia PICTURE: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP President Vladimir Putin, left, lays flowers at a place near the Tekhnologichesky Institut subway station in St Petersburg, Russia PICTURE: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP

RUSSIAN investigators have said they believe a suicide bomber was behind a deadly attack on the subway in St Petersburg.

A blast inside a train on the subway claimed 14 lives and injured dozens on Monday.

The investigative committee said they suspect that a man whose body parts they found on the train was a suicide bomber. The committee said they had identified him but would not release the details in the interests of the probe.

Earlier, Kyrgyzstan's State Committee for National Security identified a suspect as Kyrgyz-born Russian Akbarzhon Dzhalilov. It is unclear whether the Russian and Kyrgyz statements referred to the same man.

Earlier, a Kremlin spokesman said intelligence agencies will look into the fact that the subway blast happened while President Vladimir Putin was in town.

Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the fact Mr Putin was in the city when the bomb went off, although several dozen miles away from where he was hosting talks, "makes one pause" and is "something for the intelligence agencies to analyse".

Residents have been bringing flowers to the stations near where the blast occurred. Every corner at the ornate, Soviet-built Sennaya Square station on Tuesday was covered with red and white carnations.

Russia's health minister today raised the death toll from 11 to 14 and said 49 people were still in hospital.

The entire subway system in the city of five million was shut down and evacuated before partial service resumed six hours later.

Later on Tuesday morning, emergency officials said they had closed four subway station in St Petersburg following a bomb threat.

The Sennaya Square station was cordoned off, and commuters were told that three more stations had also been closed down.

Typically crowded during the rush hour, the subway on Tuesday morning looked almost deserted as many residents opted for buses.

"First, I was really scared," said Viktoria Prishchepova who did take the subway. "I didn't want to go anywhere on the metro because I was nervous. Everyone was calling their loved ones yesterday, checking if they were Ok and how everyone was going to get home."

The Interfax news agency on Monday said authorities believe the suspect was linked to radical Islamic groups and carried the explosive device onto the train in a backpack.

Within two hours of the blast, authorities had found and deactivated another bomb at another busy station, the anti-terror agency said. That station is a major transfer point for passengers on two lines and serves the railway station to Moscow.

St Petersburg, like Moscow, is home to a large number of Central Asian migrants who flee poverty and unemployment in their home countries for jobs in Russia.

While most Central Asian migrants in Russia have work permits or work illegally, thousands of them have received Russian citizenship in the past decades.

Russian authorities have rejected calls to impose visas on Central Asian nationals, hinting that having millions of jobless men across the border from Russia would be a bigger security threat.

Patriach Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, led a service at Moscow's main cathedral on Tuesday for those killed in the blast.

"This terrorist act is a threat to all of us, all our nation," he said.

In the past two decades, Russian trains and planes have been frequent targets of attack, usually blamed on Islamic militants.

The last confirmed attack was in October 2015 when Islamic State militants downed a Russian airliner heading from an Egyptian resort to St Petersburg, killing all 224 people on board.

Separately, in the southern Russian city of Astrakhan, two policemen were killed in the early hours on Tuesday in a suspected Islamist militant attack.

Alexander Zhilkin, governor of the region hundreds of miles away from the insurgency in the North Caucasus, said the suspected Islamists are on the run.