Ukraine offered Moscow bombing suspect $158,000 to kill top general, Russia claims

Moscow: Russian authorities have detained an Uzbekistan national on suspicion of killing a top general in a Moscow bomb attack, and said he’d been recruited by Ukrainian security services to carry out the assassination.

The detainee was promised $US100,000 ($158,000) and safe passage to a European country if he helped plant the explosive device that killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s radiological, chemical and biological defence forces, the Investigative Committee in Moscow said in a statement Wednesday on messaging platform Telegram.

Investigators stand at the site where Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces, and his assistant, Ilya Polikarpov, were killed by an explosive device.Credit: AP

Kirillov and his assistant were killed when the bomb planted on a scooter detonated near the entrance to an apartment building in Moscow on Tuesday. He is the most senior Russian commander to be assassinated deep inside Russia since the Kremlin began its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The Uzbek citizen received the device on instructions from Ukrainian agents and placed it on the scooter, according to the Investigative Committee. He also rented a car to install a video surveillance camera that was used by organisers of the attack to monitor the entrance to the building from the Ukrainian city of Dnipro and to detonate the device remotely, it said.

The assassination came a day after Ukraine’s SBU security service accused Kirillov of ordering the “massive use” of banned chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops in the country’s east and south, saying there had been more than 4800 cases in a statement on its Telegram channel.

Ukraine hasn’t commented on the detention so far. A person in Ukraine familiar with the operation who spoke on condition of anonymity on Tuesday said the SBU was behind the killing.

Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defence Forces, speaks at a briefing in Moscow, Russia.Credit: AP

Russia’s Federal Security Service said it was part of a joint operation with the Investigative Committee and the Interior Ministry to detain the suspect. Other people involved in organising the killing were still being identified, the Investigative Committee said.

Kirillov was known to the Russian public from his regular briefings at the Defence Ministry. The general was sanctioned by the UK in October for the use of chemical weapons. The UK also accused Kirillov of “spreading lies to mask Russia’s shameful and dangerous behaviour”.

The force Kirillov commanded produces some of the Kremlin’s deadliest weapons, from nerve agents and poisons to the Solntsepyok multiple rocket launcher, which uses both a flamethrower and thermobaric shock.

Dmitry Medvedev, former president and deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, on Tuesday threatened “punishment” for Ukraine’s “top military and political leaders” in retaliation for the killing, according to the state-run Tass news service.

In a video of the confession published by the Baza news outlet, which is known to have sources in Russian law enforcement circles, the suspect is seen sitting in a van describing his actions.

It was not clear what conditions he was speaking in, and Reuters could not immediately verify the video’s authenticity.

Dressed in a winter coat, the suspect is shown saying he had come to Moscow at the orders of Ukraine’s intelligence services, bought an electric scooter, and then received an improvised explosive device to carry out the hit months later.

He describes how he had placed the device on the electric scooter that he had parked outside the entrance of the apartment block where Kirillov lived.

Investigators cited him as saying that he had set up a surveillance camera in a hire car nearby and that the organisers of the assassination, who he was cited as saying had been based in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, had used the camera to watch what was going on.

In the video, the suspect, who was born in 1995, is shown saying that he had remotely detonated the device once Kirillov had left the building.

Bloomberg, Reuters

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