A blast shook Kyiv on the night of April 27, as a grenade went off in a moving car in the southeastern part of the city, killing the only passenger and badly injuring the driver.
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The explosion happened at 10:20 p.m. inside a Chevrolet car driving the Mykhaila Dragomanova Street in the densely populated Poznyaky neighborhood on the left bank of the Dnipro River.
The passenger died instantly, while the driver was badly injured and taken to the hospital. He had surgery and remained unconscious at last report.
The police are investigating the incident as a deliberate murder. They are considering two versions: that the grenade was thrown into the car, or the passenger had the grenade on him.
According to Andriy Krishchenko, the chief of the National Police in Kyiv, the two men in the car knew each other. He said the explosion happened almost immediately as the passenger got into the car and it started to move. Right after the blast, none of them tried to leave the car, and nobody approached the wreck from outside.
Facebook user Olga Dniprovska claims she saw the scene right after the blast from her apartment’s window.
“Horrifying sight… the passenger was charred, while the driver was taken to the hospital, he was injured all right,” she commented under the police announcement. “Why did they need to have grenades in their car?”
Kyiv has become well familiar with car blasts in the past several years, as a series of resonant murders and attempted murders using car bombs took place in the city.
In September, a bomb went off in the car of a Georgian citizen Ali Tamayev in the Kyiv downtown, killing him and wounding his two passengers.
Another car bomb killed Maksym Shapoval, a top officer of the Defense Ministry’s intelligence service, on June 27 in Kyiv.
Days before that, a car belonging to a businessman known to own expensive real estate in Crimea was blown up in Kyiv, leaving no one wounded though.
Almost two years ago, another car bomb killed Pavel Sheremet, a prominent Ukrainian-Belarusian journalist who worked at Ukrainska Pravda and Radio Vesti. The investigation made no progress, bringing rage of the local journalists’ community, who protested the authorities’ inactiveness.
