An Uzbek citizen has been arrested in connection with the assassination of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, who was killed early on Tuesday morning at his residence in Moscow, according to Russian authorities.
A statement released on Wednesday by Russia’s Investigative Committee, which investigates serious crimes, revealed that the suspect confessed to planting a bomb that killed Kirillov, claiming he acted under instructions from Ukraine’s security service.
Kirillov, the chief of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, was killed outside his apartment building, along with his assistant, when a bomb concealed in an electric scooter exploded.
He is the highest-ranking Russian military officer to be assassinated on Russian soil by Ukrainian forces. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service, which accused Kirillov of facilitating the use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops—an allegation Moscow denies—claimed responsibility for the attack.
However, the investigative committee’s statement detailed that the suspect, whose identity has not yet been disclosed, confessed during interrogation that he had travelled to Moscow, where he obtained an improvised explosive device for the assassination.
According to the statement, he described how he placed the device on an electric scooter parked outside the entrance of Kirillov’s apartment block.
Investigators noted that he reported having set up a surveillance camera in a hired car nearby, and that the organisers of the assassination, based in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, used that camera to monitor Kirillov and remotely detonate the device when he left the building.
The statement revealed that the suspect, born in 1995, had been promised $100,000 for his involvement in the murder, along with residency in a European country.
Investigators are currently working to identify others involved in the operation, and the daily Kommersant reported that another suspect has already been detained.
