Blast kills three in Moscow near site of General’s car bombing

By Ivan Nechepurenko

Georgia: Three people, including two police officers, were killed Wednesday by a bomb in Moscow after the officers tried to apprehend a person acting suspiciously near a police car, Russian investigators said.

The blast occurred next to a police station in the same southern Moscow neighborhood where a senior Russian military commander was killed Monday by a bomb placed under his car. The commander, Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov, was killed about 1,000 feet away from the site of Wednesday’s blast.

Russian investigators have said they were looking into whether the commander’s killing had been orchestrated by Ukrainian intelligence services. Investigators made no reference to Ukraine in their statements about the bombing Wednesday.

Moscow traffic police identified the officers who were killed Wednesday as Ilya Klimanov, 24, and Maksim Gorbunov, 25.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s equivalent of the FBI, said in a statement that the officers had “spotted a suspicious person” next to a police car early Wednesday morning. The statement did not provide details about what the person had been doing and why it had caught the officers’ attention.

A bomb went off when the officers approached the person to apprehend him, the statement said. It was not immediately clear whether the blast’s third victim was that person.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, several high-profile figures, including military commanders and vocal supporters of the war, have been killed in targeted assassinations claimed by Ukrainian special services.

Sarvarov served as the head of the Russian General Staff’s army operational training directorate. In Russia, law enforcement officers and military commanders often live in the same buildings or neighborhoods, in apartments distributed by their employers.