TASHKENT -- Uzbekistan Friday (April 14) said the suspect in last week's deadly Stockholm truck attack had ties to "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" (ISIL) militants and the West had been warned about him, according to RIA Novosti.
Rakhmat Akilov, a 39-year-old Uzbekistani national, is in custody on suspicion of driving a truck through a crowd of people on a busy street in the Swedish city. The attack killed four people.
Uzbekistani Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov said Akilov was radicalised after moving to Sweden in 2014 and the Central Asian nation's intelligence service had passed on information about him.
"During his stay abroad, he was recruited through the internet by emissaries of the international terrorist organisation ISIL," Kamilov said at a news conference in Tashkent, according to RIA Novosti.
Akilov repeatedly sent extremist videos to friends and families in Uzbekistan, urging them to attack law enforcement officials, added Kamilov, according to Podrobno.uz.
"Information about the wrongful acts of Rakhmat Akilov was transferred via the special services to one of our Western partners to further inform the Swedish side," he added, without identifying the "partner".
