You're reading: Man blows himself up in Chernivtsi university (UPDATED)

An explosion ripped through one of the buildings of a medical university in Chernivtsi of western Ukraine on Dec. 27. 

Regional prosecutors said a 62-year-old man had been killed in the incident, which they said probably involved a hand grenade.

“According to preliminary information, the dead person was at odds with a staff member (of the university) over a plot of land …,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Two people, a 42-year-old professor and an 18-year-old student, were hospitalized, the Molody Bukovynets newspaper reports. 

Police were looking into different possible causes of the blast, including the possibility that it may have been a bomb attack, a police spokeswoman said.

Bomb attacks are rare in the former Soviet republic of 45 million.

The most recent one, last April, wounded 30 people in the city of Dnipropetrovsk. Its alleged perpetrators are now on trial and accused of trying to extort money from the government by threatening to carry out further attacks.