You're reading: Update: Assassination attempt fails, perpetrator injured

Editor’s note: The article previously stated that the perpetrator died in hospital. According to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) the assassin is alive.

A man was injured and a dog was killed overnight on April 4 in the car park of a Kyiv shopping center in what appears to have been a bungled assassination plot.

CCTV footage of the incident shows a man dressed in dark clothes approach a black Chevrolet Epica car: The man crouches down beside the car, the dog trots up to him and then there is a large explosion, and smoke obscures the scene.

The man was hospitalized, yet days later it was revealed  that the man survived and was detained by the SBU. The dog was killed instantly.

Kyiv police reported that an explosion had occurred in Kyiv’s Holosiivskyi district. The police said that the car had not belonged to the hospitalized individual. The Prosecutor General’s Office later issued a statement reporting that the car under which the bomb was being placed had belonged to an unnamed intelligence officer.

On April 17, Vasyl Hrytsak, head of SBU, during a briefing, reported that the assign was identified as a Russian citizen Aleksey Komarov, a member of FSB, the Russian state security agency.

According to Hrytsak, the Russian agent is part of a Russian spy group, responsible for the assassination of Maksym Shapoval, army colonel serving as the head of special forces at the Chief Military Intelligence Office, blown up in his car, on June 27, 2017 in Kyiv.

This is the latest in a series of car bombings in Kyiv in recent years. In September 2017 a bomb went off in the car of Georgian citizen Ali Tamayev in Kyiv’s downtown, killing him and wounding two passengers.

Days before the assassination of Shapoval, a car belonging to a businessman known to own expensive real estate in Crimea was blown up in Kyiv, although nobody was hurt in that incident.

Almost two years ago, in July 2016, another car bomb killed Pavel Sheremet, a prominent Ukrainian-Belarusian journalist who worked at Ukrainska Pravda online newspaper and Radio Vesti. The investigation into the murder has made no progress.