ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—A blast in a St Petersburg train carriage on Monday that killed 11 people and injured 45 was carried out by a suspected suicide bomber with ties to radical Islamists, Russia’s Interfax news agency cited a law enforcement source as saying.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was in the city when the blast struck, visited the scene of the explosion late on Monday night and laid a bunch of red flowers at a makeshift shrine to the victims.
Witnesses said they saw passengers who were bloodied and burned spilling out of the train, whose door was buckled by the force of the explosion, and lying on a platform while smoke filled the station.
Russia has in the past experienced bomb attacks carried out by radical Islamist rebels from Russia’s North Caucasus region. The rebellion there has been largely crushed, but Russia’s military intervention in Syria has now made it a potential target for ISIS attacks, security experts say.
