Russian chemical weapons chief Kirillov buried with military honours

By Andrew Osborn

MOSCOW (Reuters) -A Russian general assassinated by Ukraine was buried with full military honours on Friday and posthumously granted a top award, as Moscow launched an apparent revenge attack on what it said was a Ukrainian intelligence service command centre in Kyiv.

Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, who was chief of Russia's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, is the most senior Russian officer to be killed inside Russia by Ukraine.

He was killed outside his Moscow apartment building on Tuesday along with his assistant when a bomb attached to an electric scooter went off in an attack for which Ukraine's SBU security service took responsibility.

State news agency RIA said Kirillov was buried in a ceremony outside Moscow attended by Defence Minister Andrei Belousov and Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia's Security Council.

It said the ceremony had taken place at a Defence Ministry memorial complex called the Pantheon of the Defenders of the Fatherland.

Video broadcast by the Defence Ministry's Zvezda TV channel showed Belousov giving Kirillov's widow the Hero of Russia award, the country's top military honour, which President Vladimir Putin had decided to grant Kirillov posthumously.

Footage of the funeral showed an honour guard carrying a coffin draped in the national flag and Kirillov's cap on top of it as solemn music played. A 10-man honour guard fired shots into the air in a snow-covered cemetery after his coffin was lowered into the ground as the national anthem played and mourners looked on.

Among giant wreaths were two sent by Putin and former President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council and has called for the masterminds of the killing in Ukraine to be destroyed.

Russia's Defence Ministry said it had struck an SBU command centre in Kyiv in an attack which RIA said had killed several high-ranking military and SBU members.

Reuters could not confirm that report. Officials in Kyiv said at least one person had been killed in a missile strike on the Ukrainian capital on Friday, but Ukraine rarely provides details of strikes on military targets.

The Russian Defence Ministry did not directly link the strike on the SBU command centre to Kirillov, saying it was vengeance for a Ukrainian attack on Russia's Rostov region.

A court in Moscow on Thursday ordered the main suspect in Kirillov's killing, a native of Uzbekistan, to be sent to pre-trial detention for two months after he was shown on state TV confessing to planting and detonating the bomb that killed Kirillov, 54, and his assistant.

(Reporting by Andrew Osborn, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Rod Nickel)