The Lithuanian authorities have affordable causes to consider that the Russian army intelligence has organized and financed the incendiary assault of the Ikea store in Vilnius in 2024, stated the prosecutor General of the Baltic nation.
The foremost suspected within the accident was dedicated to “army and Russian safety providers” and accepted the fee inside a terrorist group that conspires the assaults each in Lithuania and in Latvia, in response to Monday’s declaration.
The suspicion is claimed to have planted a time fuse within the store on May 9 final yr, which was activated through the night time.
After turning the fireplace and despatched the video, the suspicion in case tried to cover their tracks and fled to Warsaw, the place they collected a BMW as a reward for finishing the duty.
The overseas citizen, who was a minor on the time of the assault, had repeatedly visited Poland and Lithuania to gather info and plan the malicious hearth.
The particular person was arrested on the highway to commit an assault much like line.
The authorities said that the information from pre-processual investigation supplies have allowed them to “moderately assume” that the person acted within the curiosity of the “army buildings and safety providers of the Russian Federation” in a pre-established terrorist group.
Lithuania prosecutor stated that the suspicion geared toward intimidating and dividing the businesses of each Lithuania and Latvia within the execution of those assaults and urgent the authorities to cease their assist for Ukraine.
They ought to face the arrest in what’s handled as an act of terrorism.
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Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has plundered the accident, publishing on X that the investigations of Lithuania “confirmed our suspicions that the pinnacle of the setting of fires in procuring facilities in Vilnius and Warsaw are the Russian secret providers”.
Last yr, Tusk made positive that he insulted the Ikea accident in Vilnius when the Polish authorities arrested 9 members of an alleged Russian spy ring in May.
Tusk informed the TVn24 broadcaster that suspicions “had been implicated straight within the title of Russian providers (intelligence) in sabotage acts in Poland”, including that individuals had been Ukrainian, Belarusian and Poles residents.
Next to the blaze within the Vilnius procuring middle, Tusk talked about an try and set hearth to a paint manufacturing facility within the Western Polish metropolis of Wrocław.
