Moscow court finds four men guilty of 2024 murder of Russian general

A court in Moscow has convicted three Russians and a citizen of Uzbekistan of the 2024 murder of General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, the Investigative Committee announced on Wednesday.

Ahmadjon Kurbonov was sentenced to life imprisonment and will serve his sentence in a high-security penal colony, while the other three defendants, Robert Safaryan, Batukhan Tochiev and Ramazan Padiev were sentenced to prison terms of 25 years, 22 years and 18 years respectively. In addition to being found guilty of murder, the men were also convicted on terrorism and explosives charges.

Kirillov was killed near his apartment building in Moscow alongside his assistant Ilya Polikarpov on the morning of 17 December 2024 when a bomb hidden in an electric scooter parked outside the building exploded.

According to investigators, components used to build an explosive device were delivered to Safaryan in Moscow from Poland in late 2024, which he then hid at home before passing them to Kurbonov, who, with assistance from Tochiev and Padiev, perpetrated the attack by mounting them on a scooter and detonating them remotely.

The day before the assassination, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) announced that a criminal case had been opened against Kirillov, who, it alleged, had ordered Russian troops to use chemical weapons on over 4,800 separate occasions since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The day after the attack, the SBU told PBS that it was responsible for the assassination, calling Kirillov a “legitimate target”.

Kirillov, who had been sanctioned by the UK, Canada and Ukraine, had headed Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops since 2017. He was known for making outlandish claims, such as the United States using secret laboratories in Ukraine to develop biological weapons involving mosquitoes and migratory birds designed to spread viruses, according to Russian press reports.