Senior Russian naval officer killed in car bomb hit claimed by Kyiv

A bomb planted under a car blew up and killed a Russian serviceman in the occupied Crimean city of Sevastopol on Wednesday in what a Kyiv security source told NBC News was a Ukrainian hit on a senior naval official accused of war crimes.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles probes into serious crimes, said in a statement that an improvised explosive device had detonated, killing a serviceman whom it did not identify. It said it was treating the crime as terrorism.

A source in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said the explosion killed Valery Trankovsky, a Russian naval captain in charge of the headquarters of the 41st Brigade of Russia’s Black Sea missile ships.

The car bombing was “a successful special operation of the SBU. As a result of the explosion, the legs of the Russian captain were torn off. He died from blood loss,” the source said.

Read more: NBC News