A loud explosion damaged an apartment building Thursday in St. Petersburg, Russia, days after the deadly subway attack in that city, witnesses said.
(FOX)- There were no reports of anybody hurt in the latest blast. The cause was unclear.
It happened not far from a site where security agents deactivated explosives they found earlier in the day, witnesses told Reuters. There, the agents arrested three people suspected of links to the suicide bomber who killed 13 and wounded more than 50 others in Monday’s subway attack.
Falling masonry damaged a car after Thursday’s explosion, a source in Russia’s emergencies ministry told the RIA news agency.
The suspects arrested Thursday were residents of the former Soviet Central Asia region — like the subway bomber, 22-year-old Akbarzhon Dzhalilov, a native of Kyrgyzstan, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee.
The impoverished, predominantly Muslim countries in Central Asia are seen as fertile ground for Islamic extremists, and thousands of their citizens are believed to have joined the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.
Materials used in the explosivs found Thursday matched those used by militants in Syria, according to a leading St. Petersburg news portal, Fontanka.ru.
Investigators were checking information that Dzhalilov may have trained with the Islamic State terror group in Syria, an unidentified law enforcement official told the Tass news agency.