An explosive device detonated on Monday evening at the entrance of a residential building in Monaco, along the border with France, wounding three people in what authorities are treating as a targeted attack. The blast struck a married couple believed to be in their fifties or sixties and a 13-year-old, leaving the two adults with serious injuries while the teenager was hurt less severely. Footage circulated on social media showed firefighters at the scene evacuating one person on a stretcher.
According to investigators, the victims were a Ukrainian oligarch and his immediate family. The man targeted was identified as Vadim Ermolyev, a 58-year-old Ukrainian businessman who is well known in his home country, where he is counted among the major industrialists who helped shape its economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union, building up what would become a major company from the mid-1990s. He was reportedly at the building with his wife and their child when the device went off.
The attack drew swift condemnation from the highest levels of the principality. Monaco's Prince Albert II denounced the bombing as a despicable crime, a statement that underscored both the severity of the act and the alarm it caused in an area more accustomed to calm than to violence of this kind.
Investigators turned quickly to surveillance footage as they pieced together what happened. The recordings reportedly show the suspect, whom witnesses are said to have helped identify through tips to authorities, fleeing the scene on foot and crossing the border into neighbouring France in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.
Because the suspect crossed an international boundary, the search became a cross-border effort. France's national police and the Monégasque authorities launched a joint manhunt, coordinating their efforts on either side of the frontier in a bid to track down the person responsible before the trail went cold.
As of the latest reports, the suspect remained at large and the motive behind the attack had not been publicly established. With the victims identified as a foreign business figure and his family, and an explosive device used at a residential entrance, the case has taken on a sensitive dimension, and authorities were continuing to gather evidence as the investigation pressed forward.