Russia’s security service says it has detained an Uzbekistan citizen suspected of planting the e-scooter bomb that killed top general Igor Kirillov in Moscow yesterday.
Kirillov, who led Vladimir Putin’s nuclear troops, and his assistant were blown up outside his apartment building around four miles from the Kremlin on Tuesday.
The explosive was triggered remotely, Russia’s news agency Tass reported, citing unnamed sources in the emergency services.
An ex-secret service officer for Ukraine told Metro that the assassination was carried out by counter intelligence officers.
‘The liquidation of the chief of the radiation and chemical protection troops of the Russian Federation is the work of the SBU,’ another source also told Reuters.
Kirillov’s death comes 24 hours after Ukraine accused him of overseeing the widespread use of banned chemical weapons against its troops in the conflict zone.
Photographs posted on Russian Telegram channels showed a shattered entrance to a building littered with rubble and two bodies lying in the blood-stained snow.
The UK placed sanctions on Kirillov in October for or using riot control agents and the reported use of toxic choking agent chloropicrin on the battlefield, adding he also acted as a ‘significant mouthpiece for Kremlin disinformation’.
Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, said that they had recorded more than 4,800 uses of chemical weapons on the battlefield since February 2022, particularly K-1 combat grenades.
The Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal case following the explosion on Ryazansky Prospekt in Moscow.
Investigators confirmed the deaths of two men and said that a suspect in the case is being identified.
The second man killed was identified only as Ilya P. There was no immediate claim of responsibility from Ukraine.
The SBU said: ‘The Security Service has documented war crimes committed by Russian Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, Chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops of the Russian Armed Forces.
‘The official is responsible for the mass use of prohibited chemical weapons by Russian militants against the Defence Forces on the eastern and southern fronts of Ukraine.
‘On Kirillov’s orders, more than 4,800 cases of the enemy using chemical munitions have been recorded since the beginning of the full-scale war.’
Kirillov served as the Chief of the Russian Armed Forces’ Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defence Troops since 2017.
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He was known for spreading conspiracy theories about Western use of chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine.
In March 2022, he gave a Defence Ministry presentation about alleged American biolabs in Ukraine that are developing projects to spread biological weapons using bats and birds.
Kirillov also accused Ukraine of provocations using toxic chemicals, including a ‘dirty bomb’.
In August he said providing no proof: ‘The facts of the simultaneous supply of toxic chemicals and means of protection against them indicate an attempt to carry out large-scale provocations using the psychotropic chemical warfare agent BZ during the conflict.’
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