Russian general in charge of chemical weapons killed in scooter attack

Correspondent in Moscow

It was 6 a.m. on Ryazanski Avenue, in the southeast of Moscow, when Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, 54, coming out of his building and greeted by his driver, Ilya Polikarpov, was about to board a his service Toyota. Suddenly, a « very strong explosion »as local residents will testify. The explosion, caused by a three hundred gram bomb of TNT attached to the handlebars of an electric scooter and triggered remotely, caused the instant death of the two men.

General Kirillov, the most senior Russian military official to die in an attack in Moscow since the start of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, was far from unknown. Since 2017, he was head of the radio-nuclear, chemical and biological defense forces and was accused by Great Britain of having deployed chemical weapons in Ukraine and sanctioned as such by London in…