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More than 100 police and emergency personnel were deployed to the scene of the blast on Monday evening.<\/p>\n
Harri Richie, who lives around 100m away from the targeted building, told the BBC she heard an “unbelievably loud explosion” at about 21:00 local time from the underground car park she was in.<\/p>\n
She then went up to her 11th floor apartment, where she said she saw emergency services “dragging two people out [from the building] who looked badly injured”.<\/p>\n
Emergency services arrived around five minutes after the explosion, she said, adding that there was a helicopter overhead throughout Monday night.<\/p>\n
“This is the first time in history, to my knowledge, that such an act has taken place in the principality,” Mirmand, the head of Monaco’s government, said.<\/p>\n
Monaco’s Prince Albert II described the incident as a “heinous crime” and “a shock to the entire Monaco community”.<\/p>\n
Citing anonymous sources, French newspaper Le Figaro reports that the three victims seriously hurt in the attack are Yermolaiev, his partner and their 13-year-old son.<\/p>\n
Yermolaiev is a 58-year-old wealthy real estate developer from Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, who has been living in Monaco.<\/p>\n
He is now a Cypriot citizen after renouncing his Ukrainian citizenship in 2019. <\/p>\n
He has big interests in the wine and alcohol business in Russian-annexed Crimea, and since 2023 has been the subject of sanctions imposed by the government in Kyiv.<\/p>\n
He was named the 39th richest Ukrainian by Forbes magazine in 2020, with a fortune of $230m (\u00a3173.8m).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n