MOSCOW: Russia on Wednesday jailed an Uzbek man for life and handed three other men long sentences over the 2024 killing of Russian army general in Moscow on Ukrainian orders, an AFP reporter in the court said.
Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov was killed with his assistant when a booby-trapped electric scooter exploded as they left a residential building in Moscow at dawn.
A Moscow military court sentenced Akhmadzhon Kurbonov — accused of planting the device — to life in prison.
Three other men were handed sentences ranging from 18 to 25 years for being accomplices.
Kirillov is the highest-ranking Russian military official to be assassinated on Russian soil during the war so far, with President Vladimir Putin making a rare admission of security failings at the time.
Kyiv’s secret services had said the killing was the result of their “special operation,” calling Kirillov a “war criminal and an absolutely legitimate target.”
State prosecutors said Kurbonov, an Uzbek man born in 1995, had planted the bomb on the scooter and that he was promised money and a European passport.
The FSB security service said Kurbonov was working as a delivery man, and released a video in which he said he had “pressed the button.”
It also arrested a Russian citizen born in Azerbaijan — Robert Safaryan — accusing him of keeping components for the explosive device and handing them to Kurbonov.
Russia says two more men — Batukhan Tochiyev and Ramzan Padiyev — had rented a flat for Kurbonov on the orders of a “curator.”
Russia has also arrested several people abroad in absentia, saying they had organized the transport for the bomb from Poland to Russia.
- Army career -
Kirillov — 54 at the time of death — was killed alongside his assistant Ilya Polikarpov.
Since 2017, he had been the head of the Russian army’s radiological, chemical and biological defense forces.
Kyiv had accused him of giving orders to “use banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian military.”
Under British and Canadian sanctions, he had built a career accusing the West of creating laboratories to spread mysterious diseases, without providing evidence.
In 2022, he had accused the United States of planning to use drones in Ukraine that would spread “infected insects into the air” to spread unnamed diseases — reviving similar claims of Soviet-era propaganda.
He had also repeatedly said that the West had created the Covid pandemic in a laboratory — a known conspiracy theory.
During Moscow’s intervention in the Syrian civil war, Kirillov had accused the Syrian opposition and the White Helmets humanitarian organization of staging chemical attacks — despite overwhelming evidence it was carried out by government forces.
Ukraine has organized a string of killings on Russian soil during Moscow’s offensive.
