Russian authorities say they have arrested a suspect in connection with the assassination of top General Igor Kirillov, head of the country’s army’s chemical weapons division, adding that he was recruited by Ukraine.
The suspect, a 29-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan, was detained in the village of Chernoye in the Balashikha district of Moscow on Wednesday, according to Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk.
The arrested individual whose name was not released had allegedly been recruited by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) to carry out the attack which killed the top Kremlin general and his assistant in Moscow a day earlier, the country’s investigative committee said.
Investigation revealed that the assailant had been promised $100,000 and travel to the European Union after successfully accomplishing his mission.
The detainee traveled to Moscow and placed a homemade bomb under an electric scooter parked near the general’s home, investigators said.
To monitor the area, he rented a car equipped with a surveillance camera, transmitting live footage back to the organizers in Dnepr, Ukraine.
After receiving the video signal of the officers exiting the building, the explosive device was remotely activated.
According to a spokeswoman for Russia’s prosecutor’s office, the detainee has confessed to planting the bomb.
Kirillov, head of the Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Defense Forces (NBC), and his aide were killed early Tuesday morning in Moscow when an improvised explosive device, cleverly concealed within a parked scooter, detonated near a residential building on Ryazansky Prospekt, approximately 7 kilometers from the Kremlin.
The Investigative Committee of Russia confirmed the devastating impact of the explosion, which took the lives of Kirillov and his assistant and shattered windows in a nearby building.
The committee announced the opening of a criminal investigation into the incident and detailed the nature of the blast, which was equivalent in power to around 200 grams of TNT.
Later in the day, SBU claimed responsibility for the attack.
Ukrainian sources also claimed that 54-year-old Kirillov had a role in the alleged deployment of prohibited chemical weapons in Ukraine.
His death comes a day after Ukrainian prosecutors charged him with the alleged use of banned chemical weapons in the Ukraine war.
The Kremlin called accusations of using chloropicrin “baseless.”
The general had faced sanctions from countries like the UK, Canada, and New Zealand prior to his death.
The assassination of Kirillov has intensified the already high-stakes conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
