AKIPRESS.COM - The main suspect in a suicide bombing on the St Petersburg metro that killed 14 people had rented an apartment in the city a month before the blast, neighbors and a building maintenance worker told Reuterson Wednesday.

A day after Monday's attack, security officials raided the apartment and ordered other residents to leave -- a precaution often undertaken when police believe there may be explosives or bomb-making equipment inside.

A witness who was present during the search, and who did not want to be identified, told Reuters she saw belongings packed into black bags and cardboard boxes, and household containers with an unidentified powder inside.

The Investigative Committee, the state body leading the investigation, said footage from security cameras near the same building showed the suspect, Akbarzhon Jalilov, leaving home carrying a bag and a rucksack. It did not specify if that was on the day of the attack.

Jalilov was born in 1995 in Kyrgyzstan and held a Russian passport.

If it is proven that he was motivated by militant Islamist ideology, that will test Russian President Vladimir Putin's policy of military intervention in Syria.

Some Russians may decide their country's intervention is making them a target for reprisal attacks by Islamists instead of making them safer as Putin had told them would happen.

Jalilov moving into the rented apartment, in a Soviet-built nine-storey building in north-eastern St Petersburg, coincided with his return from a visit to his home city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan.

Two Kyrgyz government sources told Reuters that Jalilov made the trip in February, leaving in early March on a flight to Moscow.

Osh is part of the Fergana Valley, a fertile strip of land that straddles Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and is mainly populated by ethnic Uzbeks. It has a tradition of Islamist radicalism and hundreds of people have set out from the area to join Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Jalilov had previously lived in St Petersburg for several years. It was not clear where he had been living before his trip back to Osh, or why he moved to a new apartment.