Car bomb outside Moscow kills high-ranking Russian general

A high-ranking Russian general was killed in a car bombing in the Moscow region town of Balashikha, on Friday morning, TASS reported.

Yaroslav Moskalik, the deputy chief of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, was killed when an improvised explosive device that had been planted on the undercarriage of a car he used exploded at 10:40am on Friday morning, according to Russian business daily Kommersant.

Two people were killed in the blast, the driver and a passenger, both of whom were exiting the vehicle when the explosion occurred, Kommersant reported.

Despite initial confusion over who exactly had been the target of the attack, Russia’s Investigative Committee confirmed that General Moskalik had been killed in the blast and that it had opened a criminal case for murder and the illegal trafficking of explosives.

In December, Russian police detained an Uzbek citizen suspected of planting a bomb that killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov outside Kirillov’s apartment block in Moscow.

The Security Service of Ukraine claimed responsibility for the assassination, with a source telling Ukrainian news outlet The Kyiv Independent that the general was a “war criminal and completely legitimate target, as he gave orders to use banned chemical weapons against Ukrainian soldiers”.