Russian hand-to-hand combat champion named as St. Petersburg bomb blast victim
A Russian hand-to-hand combat champion has been named as one of the 14 people who lost their lives in Monday’s terror attack in St. Petersburg.
READ MORE: St. Petersburg Metro bombing: What we know so far
Twenty-five-year-old Denis Romanovich Petrov, a Russian hand-to-hand combat champion – a Russian martial art that has its origins in the Soviet Armed Forces – was killed when an explosion ripped through a train on the city’s metro.
He had been working as a coach in the city for the past year.
“He went to training on the metro, but didn’t arrive. He was a really good guy, kids really loved him. They would hop and skip to training. There are very few athletes like him; he had a big future,” one of Petrov’s colleagues told Life.ru.
Petrov was also a hand-to-hand champion of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, an Army hand-to-hand combat champion of Russia, and had a brown belt in Kyokushin karate.
READ MORE: Russian Premier League matches pay tribute to those killed in St. Petersburg Metro blast
The blast, which occurred between the Sennaya Ploshchad and Technologicheskiy Institut metro stations, also injured at least fifty others.
