Large explosion in Moscow, senior Russian general killed.
A spokesman for Moscow's emergency services revealed on December 17 that the explosive device in the incident killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, commander of the Russian armed forces' Radiation and Chemical Defense Forces.
The spokesperson said: "According to preliminary information, approximately 200 grams of TNT were used in the explosion on Ryazanskiy Prospekt."
The force of the explosion shattered the windows of the house across the street. The yard of the house was sealed off while investigators arrived at the scene on the morning of December 17. A resident living near the explosion site said she heard a loud bang at 6:12 a.m. local time (10:12 a.m. Hanoi time).
Kirillov, 54, died along with an assistant in an improvised explosive device (IED) explosion in Moscow. He had held this position since 2017, participating in the development and deployment of the TOS-2 Tosochka heavy flamethrower system. Kirillov was placed on Western sanctions lists for his involvement in special military operations.
In March 2022, Kirillov gave a briefing to the Ministry of Defense regarding the Pentagon's biological laboratories in Ukraine developing projects to spread biological weapons into Russian territory via bats and birds. He cited documents from the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, including instructions for destroying pathogenic microorganisms, as evidence of this.
The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, recalled that Kirillov had exposed the crimes of the Anglo-Saxons and the provocations of NATO for many years.