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History’s First Suicide Bomber: Ignaty Grinevitsky
On March 13, 1881, Ignaty Grinevitsky ran toward his target, Tsar Alexander II, and detonated a bomb at the Tsar’s feet, killing both of them. This is known as the first suicide bombing.
A suicide bombing is when a person uses explosives to cause a significant amount of damage, even if that means killing himself. Due to its indiscriminate nature, suicide bombing is one of the most shocking acts, as it is clearly intended to kill or harm anybody within range of the blast.
The use of suicide bombings has spread throughout modern conflict and insurgency organizations. During the Second World War, Japanese pilots employed suicide tactics, with Kamikaze pilots crashing their aircraft into Allied naval vessels. The Japanese designed weapons for suicide strikes, such as the Kaiten manned torpedo, the Ki-115 Kamikaze plane, and the Ohka Kamikaze rocket-powered plane. As the Germans started to lose, the Luftwaffe’s Rammjager units switched to an airborne ramming strategy and sent out requests for Selbstopfer missions.
According to the data provided by AOAV, there have been an estimated 13,652 suicide bombings in history: four in Tsarist Russia, seven in China before to World War II, 7,465 by…
