Belarus has detained the first suspects in the investigation into a bomb explosion at a metro station and they almost certainly include the person who carried out the attack, the state prosecutor's office claimed today.
A total of 12 people were killed and about 200 injured in the explosion on Monday at a central metro station in the capital Minsk.
"The first suspects in the blast case have been detained," Pyotr Kiselyov, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, said. "One of the detained is most likely to be the perpetrator", he said.
He did not say how many people had been held or provide any other details.
Separately, a law enforcement source told Reuters that two persons had been detained and at least one of them was a Belarussian citizen.
The blast, described by prosecutors as "an act of terrorism", was the first such attack of its kind in the heavily policed ex-Soviet state.
Reuters