The 2017 Saint Petersburg Metro Bombing
Attack Profile
Hello Insight Monitor subscribers! Yes, you read that right. We’re doing a light re-brand this week, and this publication is now called the Insight Monitor, brought to you by Insight Threat Intelligence. Our wonderful web designer Nabil over at Minimist recommended the change and I personally love it, and hope you do too. In other exciting news, we’re very close to reaching 5,000 subscribers, our goal for this year. So you know what that means: please share this post (and all posts!) broadly so we can reach that goal before the end of the year. Today, we’re going to talk about the 2017 terrorist attack in Saint Petersburg. It’s a tough one, but Elena did a great job teasing out all the details.
On April 3, 2017, a bomb in a terrorist’s briefcase detonated between the Sennaya Ploshchad and Tekhnologichesky Institut stations on the Saint Petersburg Metro in Russia. The explosion killed 14 people, including the perpetrator, and injured 50 others. The perpetrator was identified as 22-year-old Akbarjon Jalilov, a Russian citizen born in Kyrgyzstan. In December 2019, a Russian military court convicted 11 other individuals of organizing the attack. Although all denied the charges and three claimed they were tortured in custody, those convicted were handed sentences ranging from 19 years to life imprisonment.
The Saint Petersburg metro bombing was initially suspected to have been conducted, directed or inspired by ISIL, but subsequent information suggest it was ordered by Al Qaeda. In March 2022, the US Department of State assigned responsibility for the attack to Katibat al Tawhid wal Jihad (KTJ).
Attack Details
At approximately 2:30 pm on April 3, 2017, Akbarjon Jalilov carried a briefcase into the Saint Petersburg metro. Before boarding, he placed a fire extinguisher encasing a TNT bomb rigged with shrapnel at the Ploshchad station. At 2:40 pm, after getting onto a train car, he detonated a bomb containing about 2.2 pounds of explosives while the car was travelling between two stations. The resulting explosion injured and killed dozens of passengers. The fire extinguisher bomb at the station did not go off as intended and was later defused by Russian authorities.