A senior Russian general is killed in a bomb explosion in Moscow

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A top Russian general died after a bomb exploded at the entrance to his home in Moscow early Tuesday, killing him and an aide, investigators said.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, a unit specializing in major crimes, said Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, head of the military’s nuclear, chemical and biological defense forces, died in an explosion caused by a bomb placed on a motorcycle.

Kirillov is the most prominent military officer to be assassinated since Russia began its war Large scale invasion of Ukraine In 2022.

The Ukrainian security service had earlier issued a “notice of suspicion” – essentially a court order – against Kirillov for “alleged war crimes committed” against Kiev’s forces.

An official at the State Security Department declined to comment on Tuesday.

Kirillov was hit with British sanctions in October for “deploying barbaric chemical weapons in Ukraine,” including the poisonous asphyxiation agent chloropicrin.

The UK said Kirillov was also a “disinformation spokesman for the Kremlin”, referring to public briefings in which he regularly accused Kiev of planning to use chemical weapons and developing a nuclear “dirty bomb”.

Mash and 112, two news outlets on the social media app Telegram with ties to Russian law enforcement, published a photo of two bodies in the snow outside an apartment building on Ryazansky Prospekt in Moscow, surrounded by shards of glass from broken windows.

Russian media, citing sources in the investigation, reported that the bomb found on the scooter contained between 100 and 300 grams of TNT.

The Ukrainian security service’s statement on Monday said Kirillov “is responsible for the mass use of banned chemical weapons by the Russians against the defense forces of the eastern and southern fronts of Ukraine.”

It blamed him for “recording more than 4,800 cases of the enemy’s use of chemical munitions since the beginning of the total war.”

Ukrainian soldiers told the Financial Times of cases in which they were attacked with chemical weapons during battles with the Russians.

The US State Department said Russia used the chemical chloropicrin against Ukrainian forces, in violation of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Tuesday’s bombing bears the hallmarks of Ukrainian spy agencies operating inside Russia, where they have assembled a network of covert agents to carry out targeted killings of key military personnel and acts of sabotage against their enemies’ war machine to disrupt the ongoing invasion of Moscow.

Ukrainian intelligence agencies rarely claim explicit responsibility for assassinations.

Last year, Kirillov claimed that Ukraine had plans to launch special US-designed drones carrying “infected mosquitoes” that would spread malaria among Russian troops.