MOSCOW, April 16. /TASS/. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has apprehended a Russian national working for the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) for blowing up the car of a former SBU officer, Vasily Prozorov, in Moscow.
"A Russian national born in 1983 who blew up the car owned by a Russian citizen, former Ukrainian Security Service officer, in Moscow has been detained," the FSB said.
According to the FSB, the detainee had departed for Ukraine after the launch of the special military operation where he was recruited by an SBU officer in October 2023. "Tasked by his patron who acted on direct instructions from SBU chief Vasily Malyuk, he arrived in Russia in March to receive components of a remote-detonated explosive device, assembled an explosive and planted it on the car after conducting reconnaissance near the ex-SBU officer’s place of residence," the FSB reported.
While FSB officers did not divulge the name of the targeted former SBU officer, a car owned by ex-SBU officer Vasily Prozorov, who had moved to Russia before the special military operation was launched, was blown up on Korovinskoye highway in northern Moscow on the morning of April 12. The explosive weighing roughly 150 g in TNT equivalent had been planted underneath the driver’s seat of his Toyota Land Cruiser Prado off-road vehicle.
Prozorov, who was injured in the car explosion, said the Kiev regime was behind the attack. He worked for Ukraine’s SBU from 1999 to 2018 and rose to fame in the run-up to the presidential election in Ukraine in March 2019, when he told a press conference in Russia about the SBU’s operations in Ukraine in 2014-2018.
In a video released by the FSB the apprehended person confessed to the crime. He said he had been asked to track Prozorov’s car before he was given new instructions to build a bomb. "I assembled [the bomb] and at 2:00 a.m. on [April] the 9th (0:00 a.m. GMT - TASS) I planted that bomb under the car," he said.
He also said he had lived in Ukraine since 2010 before he was recruited by the SBU in 2023. In February 2023, he was sent to Moscow to surveil Prozorov.