Moscow mayor calls deadly restaurant explosion a “terrorist act”

An explosion Saturday at a Moscow restaurant that killed three people and wounded 21 others was a bombing, Russia’s national anti-terrorism committee said, the Tass state news agency reported.

The bombing was carried out with a “homemade explosive device,” the agency reported the committee as saying. The three people killed were a woman carrying the device into the restaurant, a security agent who stopped her and a customer, the committee added.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called the attack a “brutal terrorist act.” He did not name a perpetrator. He said the injured victims are “currently in the city’s hospitals, where they are receiving all necessary care.” The 21 wounded suffered injuries of varying degrees of severity, said the anti-terrorism committee.

The Moscow Investigative Committee told Tass that the attack remains under investigation. No one has publicly claimed responsibility.

Images posted on Russian Telegram channels showed fire engines and ambulances outside the building. An earlier statement by Moscow police to the Ria Novosti news agency said investigators and police forensic specialists were at the site.

Russia has been the target of several terrorist attacks in the past.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine’s secret service has claimed or been accused of several attacks on Russian military officers and public figures backing the conflict.

Russia blamed Ukraine for the killing of a senior general, Yaroslav Moskalik, in a car bomb in April 2025.

In August 2022, the nationalist Daria Dugina, daughter of hardline Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, was killed outside Moscow when a bomb attached to her car detonated. Many believe her father was the intended target.

In April 2023, pro-Kremlin military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed when a statuette he was handed exploded at a cafe in St. Petersburg.

A bomb attached to a scooter outside a Moscow apartment block killed Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of the Russian army’s chemical weapons division, and his assistant in December 2024.

And the pro-Kremlin writer and nationalist Zakhar Prilepin was seriously wounded in a May 2023 car explosion that killed another person near the city of Nizhny Novgorod.