Russia charges cafe bombing suspect with terrorism
Moscow, Apr 4 (EFE).- Russian investigators on Tuesday formally charged Darya Trepova with terrorism over the killing of a prominent Russian military blogger.
Trepova is the main suspect in the explosion that killed Vladlen Tatarsky at a St Petersburg cafe on Sunday.
Trepova faces a maximum of 20 years in prison under article 205 of the penal code, as women in Russia cannot be sentenced to life.
According to video footage of the interrogation released by the Interior Ministry on Monday, the 26-year-old Trepova admitted to investigators that she had brought a statuette that caused the explosion to the cafe.
Trepova allegedly gave the figurine to Tatarsky, 40, which contained a remote controlled explosive.
The National Anti-Terrorist Committee has blamed the attack on the Ukrainian secret services, which allegedly used people with ties to the banned Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), a group founded by jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, for the attack.
Trepova is an “active supporter” of the FBK, the committee said.
She was previously sentenced to 10 days of administrative arrest in February 2022 for an unauthorized protest denouncing the military campaign in Ukraine.
The attack on the pro-Russian military blogger is reminiscent of the one that killed Darya Dugina, a journalist and daughter of pro-Kremlin Russian political philosopher, Alexandr Dugin, in August.
She was killed when a bomb exploded under her car while she was driving outside Moscow.
The Russian authorities accused the Ukrainian secret services of being behind that attack, which Kyiv strongly denied.
On Monday, Russian president Vladimir Putin posthumously decorated Tatarsky with the Order of Valour, as he had for Dugina.
Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, was born in Ukraine’s Donetsk region and fought with pro-Russian separatists in 2014 against the Kyiv government’s army.
The blogger, who had more than 560,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel, rose to fame in September 2022 when, after attending a speech by Putin in the Kremlin, he said: “We will defeat them all, we will kill them all, we will rob everyone we want”.EFE
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