Top Russian general killed in Moscow apartment blast

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A top Russian general has died after a bomb went off at the entrance to his home in Moscow early on Tuesday, investigators said, killing him and his assistant.

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

Kirillov, the most prominent military officer to be assassinated since Russia began its full-scale of invasion of Ukraine in 2022, had regularly accused Kyiv of plotting to use chemical weapons and develop a nuclear “dirty bomb”.

Ukraine’s SBU security service had a day earlier put out a “notice of suspicion” — essentially a warrant — for Kirillov over alleged “war crimes committed” against Kyiv’s forces.

An SBU official declined to comment.

The SBU’s statement on Monday said Kirillov was “responsible for the mass use of banned chemical weapons by the Russians against the Defense Forces on the eastern and southern fronts of Ukraine”.

It blamed him for “more than 4,800 cases of the enemy’s use of chemical munitions [that] have been recorded since the beginning of the full-scale war”.

This is a developing story