Graphic new video taken from closed-circuit television shows the moment a car bomb exploded in Kyiv killing renowned investigative journalist Pavel Sheremet, an outspoken critic of leaders in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
The video shows a red car enter an intersection in downtown Kyiv on Wednesday when the driver’s door is suddenly blown open with a burst of smoke.
The vehicle stops and then rolls backwards. The video appears to show Sheremet desperately trying to crawl away from the wreckage.
READ MORE: Ukrainian journalist Pavel Sheremet killed in car bombing in Kyiv
Bystanders rush over to help pull the journalist free, before the car burst into flames.
Zoryan Shkiryak, an aide to Ukraine’s interior minister, said investigators suspected an improvised explosive device was used with the equivalent of about 600 grams of TNT, according to the Associated Press. Investigators said the device was either a delayed-action bomb or was remotely operated.
Images from the scene showed a road filled with charred metal and broken glass.
WATCH: Car bomb kills prominent journalist in Ukraine
The targeted killing of Sheremet has shaken the Ukrainian media community. Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko called Sheremet’s death a “murder.”
“The reports from the site are that Pavel Sheremet died as a result of the detonation of an explosive device. This is murder,” he wrote on Facebook.
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Sheremet was an award-winning journalist who had received the Committee to Protect Journalists’ press freedom award and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) prize for journalism and democracy.
Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko called the journalist’s death a “terrible tragedy” and said agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation will head to Kyiv shortly to help investigate the killing.
“It seems to me this was done with one aim in mind — to destabilize the situation in the country, possibly ahead of further events,” Poroshenko said in a television interview.
Investigative journalist Georgiy Gongadze, the founder of Ukrainska Pravda where Sheremet worked, was murdered 16 years ago. His decapitated body was found in a forest outside Kyiv.
The incident helped ignite the Orange Revolution of 2004-05, which resulted in a new election and the victory of an opposition candidate.
Interior Minister Khatiya Dekanoidze said in televised comments from the crime scene that she will oversee the investigation and that officials were looking at all possible motives.
“We are looking at all theories,” she said, adding that solving the murder is “very important, a matter of honour” for the Kyiv police.
Twenty-three journalists have been killed around the world so far in 2016, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Rachel Denber, deputy director for Human Rights Watch in Europe and Central Asia, called the Ukrainian journalist’s death “a huge loss.”
– With files from the Associated Press