Igor Kirillov died in the explosion on Tuesday. Also; a powerful earthquake flattens buildings and cuts communications in Vanuatu, and how one letter was delivered to the wrong address thousands of kilometres away.
Full Episode
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Chris Barrow, and at 14 GMT on Tuesday 17th December, these are our main stories. A Russian general sanctioned for using banned chemical weapons in Ukraine has been killed in a bomb blast. Kiev said they carried it out. We have the latest.
A powerful earthquake flattens buildings and cuts communications on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. And the pop star Adele has been accused of copying a Brazilian composer. Also in the podcast... Christian worship continues in Syria but how are people feeling after a tumultuous week in the Middle East?
We start in Moscow in an ordinary neighbourhood just a few kilometres southeast of the Kremlin where in the early hours of this morning a remote-controlled bomb hidden in a scooter went off outside the entrance to an apartment block. This local resident Yulia was nearby.
The explosion was so powerful I was terribly afraid to look out the window. People started coming out of this house to see what happened. Thankfully my building wasn't damaged but it's very scary.
The blast killed a senior Russian general, Igor Kirillov, who was in charge of Russia's chemical weapons as well as his assistant. The attack comes a day after Ukrainian prosecutors accused the general of using banned chemical weapons. The BBC's Russia editor Steve Rosenberg is in Moscow and gave me the latest.
I was there earlier this morning, and the apartment block had been cordoned off. There were police lines and Russian investigators outside the entrance, still clearing things away and looking for evidence. Quite a bit of damage to that particular entranceway, clearly, and a lot of shock. I mean, we spoke to residents nearby, and the sense was that, you know, suddenly this war...
which for many people has been a war on television or a war they've looked at on their phones, something that doesn't really concern them. You know, what happened today was a real jolt to the system when you have a top Russian general being assassinated in a residential district of Moscow.
It brings it home, certainly to people living around there, that actually the war in Ukraine is not happening... A long way away. It's actually very real and very close to home. And one thing the Russian authorities, I think, have been quite successful at to this point has been to normalise the war so that people think, well, you know, it's going on, but we'll get on with our own lives.
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