Russian investigators said a single man was responsible for a Thursday evening attack on the Federal Security Service’s headquarters in central Moscow that killed two of the agency’s employees.
One of the victims lost his life at the scene and the second died in the hospital from wounds he received in the attack, Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement Friday. Five others, including one civilian, were wounded and the shooter was killed, it said.
The committee identified the attacker as 39-year-old Evgeny Manyurov, a Moscow region resident. Initial reports said as many as three men were involved in the attack, and videos posted on social media showed officers conducting random searches of people in the area following the shooting.
“It seems that this man wasn’t interested in politics,” Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies, said. “This is unlikely to lead to the tightening of the screws” unless people start praising him in social media, he said.
The brazen attack in a heavily-policed area filled with government agencies and restaurants about a half mile from the Kremlin came around the same time President Vladimir Putin was attending a concert nearby in honor of the Russian security services.
At that event, Putin praised the security services, saying they had prevented 54 terrorist crimes, including 33 attacks, since the beginning of the year.
The FSB, as the security service is known, was last targeted in October 2018, when a 17-year-old anarchist injured 3 officers when he blew himself up during an attack on the intelligence service’s Arkhangelsk office, leading to a nationwide crackdown of people critical of the agency.
