A man died on Wednesday at dawn after crashing his vehicle into the gate of the Russian Embassy in Bucharest before setting himself on fire, Romanian police said.
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“The car crashed into the gate and immediately afterwards the driver triggered a device, which caused a fire” inside the passenger compartment, prosecutor Bogdan Staicu told the press.
He added that containers with flammable substances were found in the vehicle.
Images posted on social networks showed a vehicle in flames, embedded perpendicularly in the portal of the diplomatic representation.
An investigation was opened to determine the causes of this act, which remained unclear. “We do not know if it is linked to personal circumstances or to other elements,” assured the magistrate.
Questioned by AFP, the police refused to divulge any details about the identity or nationality of the driver.
According to sources cited by the media, it is the head of an NGO defending the rights of fathers, who was sentenced on Tuesday to more than 15 years in prison for sexual abuse of his minor daughter.
In his last Facebook post, two days before the incident, he expressed his solidarity with Ukrainians and called for the expulsion of all Russian diplomats. “We are all Ukrainians until this terrible war ends,” he wrote.
“It was communicated that it was not an accident, but a planned incident against the Russian representation, the driver having shouted something to the guard”, reacted on his side the powerful Investigation Committee of Russia.
In a statement, the Romanian Foreign Ministry “rejected any attribution or political significance of this tragic incident and called on the Russian Embassy to refrain from any interpretation pending the results of the investigation”.
The building, located in a wealthy district of Bucharest, has been protected since the beginning of Russian aggression in Ukraine by police barriers placed on the sidewalk, in order to prevent possible overflows during demonstrations against the war.
The boulevard was closed to traffic on Wednesday and several police officers and agents of the intelligence service were on the spot, noted an AFP journalist.
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