At least 10 people have been killed by an explosion in the St. Petersburg metro, according to Reuters. An earlier report from the RIA Novosti news agency said there were two separate blasts at two metro stations: Sennaya Ploshchad and Tekhnologichesky Institut.
Andrey Kibitov, the head of the city governor’s press service, said on Twitter (link in Russian) that 50 people were injured. Social media images showed a train carriage with its doors blown off.
Russian president Vladimir Putin was in St. Petersburg to meet with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko earlier in the day but has since left, his spokesperson said.
“The reasons for the attack are still unclear, so it’s too early to say,” Putin said in a statement. “But naturally we are looking at all possibilities—whether it’s accidental, criminal, and above all, whether it’s a terrorist attack.”
Chechen militants carried out a similar attack in 2010, when two female suicide bombers detonated bombs on Moscow metro trains, killing 38 people. In 2009, a bomb on a high-speed train traveling from Moscow to St Petersburg killed 27 people. The leader of an Islamist group in the North Caucasus claimed responsibility; 10 people were later jailed for it. Other recent attacks attributed to terrorism include a bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in 2011, which killed 37 (link in Russian), two blasts a day apart in the city of Volgograd in 2013, which killed more than 30, and a car bombing in Makhachkala in 2012, which took up to 40 lives.
This is a breaking news event and is being updated as new information emerges.