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.

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.

The blast, which occurred between the Sennaya Ploshchad and Technologicheskiy Institut metro stations, also injured at least fifty others.