Top Russian general killed in Moscow
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2024
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ukraine says it was behind the killing of a senior Russian general, Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, who died in scooter blast in Moscow..
The head of Russia's Radiation, Biological and Chemical Protection Unit was at the entrance to a residential block when a device hidden in an electric scooter went off. On Monday, Lt Gen Kirillov was charged in Kyiv for the use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine; he had already been sanctioned by the UK. We'll find out more about the killing and its likely impact.
Also in the programme: A French member of parliament tells us the island of Mayotte has, after Saturday's cyclone, been "deleted from the map"; and we'll get a sense of Syria's revolution from two big cities outside the capital.
Ukraine says it was behind the killing of a senior Russian general, Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, who died in scooter blast in Moscow..
The head of Russia's Radiation, Biological and Chemical Protection Unit was at the entrance to a residential block when a device hidden in an electric scooter went off.
On Monday, Lt Gen Kirillov was charged in Kyiv for the use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine; he had already been sanctioned by the UK. We'll find out more about the killing and its impact.
Also in the programme: A French member of parliament tells us the island of Mayotte has, after Saturday's cyclone, been "deleted from the map"; and we'll get a sense of Syria's revolution from two big cities outside the capital.
(Photo shows Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov attending a press conference in Moscow, Russia in a still image from video released on 5 November 2024. Credit: Russian Defence Ministry handout via REUTERS)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. |
| 0:11.2 | We're beginning with a street scene in Moscow. It's still dark, an unremarkable apartment block has had its entranceway blown out. |
| 0:23.1 | On the pavement, on the blood-stained snow, lie two bodies. Their lieutenant general Igor Kirolov and his assistant, |
| 0:30.4 | Kirolov was the head of Russia's radiation, biological and chemical protection unit. He'd been |
| 0:35.9 | accused by the West of overseeing the use of chemical weapons |
| 0:39.2 | in Ukraine. And shortly after the deaths were announced, Ukrainian officials briefed off the record |
| 0:44.9 | that it was their secret service which planted the bomb. Yulia is a Muscovite who lives nearby. |
| 0:52.9 | The explosion was so powerful. |
| 0:55.5 | I was terribly afraid to look out the window. |
| 0:58.0 | People started coming out of this house to see what happened. |
| 1:01.3 | Thankfully, my building wasn't damaged, but it's very scary. |
| 1:05.7 | Frank Gardner is the BBC's security correspondent. |
| 1:08.2 | What does he make of a killing? |
| 1:09.9 | Well, this is a very sophisticated |
| 1:11.8 | targeted attack, which would have taken a certain amount of reconnaissance. They didn't need to find |
| 1:16.2 | out what his pattern of life was, what sort of protection he had, what time he was going to leave |
| 1:21.1 | the building. They must have somehow known that he was going to be on his way to a meeting |
| 1:25.8 | at that time, that there wouldn't be any kind of a defensive perimeter around him. |
| 1:29.7 | You're simply going to come out of the building with his driver, get into a car, but he didn't have the chance to do that. |
| 1:34.9 | They pre-positioned the scooter with, it's thought, around 300 grams of high explosive hidden inside the handlebars, which was enough to kill him. |
| 1:43.1 | It almost certainly would have had to |
| 1:44.4 | been remotely operated from somebody with visual line of sight. Ukraine's SPU, their intelligence |
... |
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