The Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry on Tuesday dismissed media reports that the suspected perpetrator of the attack in the metro in St. Petersburg, a native of Osh, Akbarzhon Dzhalilov was once a citizen of Kyrgyzstan.
“The Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry officially states that the information that appeared in some media, that Akbarzhon Dzhalilov, suspected of committing a terror attack at a metro station in St. Petersburg on April 3, was a ‘Kyrgyz citizen’, is untrue,” the ministry said in a statement obtained by Interfax.
“According to the available data, Dzhalilov was born on April 1, 1995, in the city of Osh (southern Kyrgyzstan), was an ethnic Uzbek and had an incomplete secondary education,” the statement said.
“It should be noted that Dzhalilov had never had a Kyrgyz passport, because upon reaching the age of 16 in 2011, he, in accordance with his filed application and a petition from his father, a Russian citizen, received a Russian passport and had since temporarily resided in the Russian Federation,” the statement says.
“Currently the Kyrgyz competent authorities are providing full assistance to the law enforcement agencies in the Russian Federation in investigating this case,” the Kyrgyz ministry said.
Earlier, the Kyrgyz National Security Committee told Interfax that the possible perpetrator of the attack in the St. Petersburg metro was a native of Osh and now Russian citizen Dzhalilov, born 1995. He obtained Russian citizenship in 2011. “Kyrgyz security services are in contact with the security services of the Russian Federation on the subject of what happened in St. Petersburg,” the agency said.
Dzhalilov received Russian citizenship upon reaching the age of 16 in 2011, he had never been a Kyrgyz citizen, the source said.
