Moscow (EFE) .- Russian security forces arrested Daria Trepova on Monday, suspected of killing military blogger Vladlen Tatarski yesterday in a cafeteria in Saint Petersburg.
“On suspicion of participation in the explosion in a cafe in St. Petersburg, employees of the Investigative Committee of Russia, together with the operational services, detained Daria Trepova,” the Investigative Committee reported on Telegram this morning.
A few hours before the arrest, it had been known that Trepova, 26 years old and a native of Saint Petersburg, had been declared in search and capture by the Russian Ministry of the Interior.
Trepova was already in the crosshairs of the Russian authorities in February 2022, when she was sentenced to 10 days of administrative arrest for an unauthorized action against the military campaign in Ukraine.
A gift for Vladlen Tatarski contained the explosive
According to this Monday’s report from the Ministry of Health, 10 of the 32 injured in the attack in which Tatarski died are in serious condition.
According to witnesses to the explosion, one of the guests – presumably a woman – brought the war correspondent a statuette containing the explosive.
However, the official RIA Nóvosti news agency stated that the gift was examined before it was delivered to the military blogger, who knew the woman, since she had given him postcards on several occasions at similar events.
“The force of the explosive device was more than 200 grams of TNT (trinitrotoluene),” a source from the law enforcement and security forces told the official TASS news agency.
Ukraine denies its involvement
The Russian authorities initially accused the Ukrainian secret services of being behind the attack, a point that the Kiev government flatly denied.
Adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted last night that “spiders eat each other”, and attributed the explosion in St. Petersburg to “domestic terrorism as an instrument of political struggle” in Russia.
For his part, the head of the Wagner group, Yevgueni Prigozhin, to which the place where the attack took place belonged, indicated that he would not accuse the “Kiev regime” of the attack on Tatarski.
“I think it is the work of a group of radicals that is hardly related to the (Ukrainian) government,” said Prigozhin, who confirmed that he had given the premises to a patriotic group for the organization of various events.
Vladlen Tatarski was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and fought in 2014 in the self-proclaimed people’s republic. He had more than 560,000 subscribers to his Telegram channel.
The attack against the pro-Russian military blogger is reminiscent of the one who killed Darya Dugin, daughter of the leader of the Neo-Eurasianist Movement, Alexandr Dugin, considered close to the Kremlin, in August.
The Russian journalist died when a bomb exploded in the underbody of her vehicle as she was driving on a road on the outskirts of Moscow.