[imagesource: Twitter / Visegrád 24]
A man crashed his car carrying containers of flammable substances into the gate of the Russian embassy in the Romanian capital.
As soon as the car hit the wall, it burst into flames, killing the driver inside.
According to Aljazeera, the sedan rammed into the gate in the early hours of Wednesday morning, at which point firefighters rushed to the scene, only too late to save the driver.
Prosecutor Bogdan Staicu told reporters that right after the car crash, “the person inside the vehicle lit a device and that’s how the fire inside the car started,” reported The Citizen.
A video of the aftermath, showing the burning car, has been doing the rounds:
BREAKING:
Someone just crashed a car into the gate of the Russian Embassy in Bucharest, Romania.
1 person confirmed dead. pic.twitter.com/O40fLuab1f
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) April 6, 2022
Staicu added that “so far we can’t say that this act is tied to something else other than the driver’s personal circumstances”:
Romanian media said the driver headed an NGO for fathers’ rights and was on Tuesday sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for molesting his underage daughter.
The man’s social media pages also provide hints about his possible motive:
In his last Facebook post, two days before his death, the man wrote that “I am also Ukrainian”.
“We should all consider ourselves Ukrainians until this horrible war ends,” he wrote.
The motive for protesting against the war in Ukraine is further substantiated by Russia’s Investigative Committee:
[They] said “it has been communicated that it was not an accident but a planned incident against the Russian representation, the driver having shouted something at the guard”.
The police were on the scene to collect evidence from around the crashed car:
The embassy in Bucharest has “repeatedly” received threats by email, according to Russia’s ambassador to Romania, Valery Kuzmin, who added that the “atmosphere that has been gradually forming here is very tense”.
