The 26-year-old is suspected of Sunday’s murder of a Russian military blogger.
32 people were injured in Sunday’s explosion in a cafe in St. Petersburg, 10 of them seriously. But most of it has been about the so far only person who was killed, the military blogger Vladlen Tatarskij.
On Monday, the Interfax news agency reported that the police had arrested a 26-year-old woman for the murder.
There were later conflicting reports about the arrest. But later in the day, the Investigative Committee, Russia’s answer to the FBI, confirmed that the woman has been arrested.
The video at the top of the case should show her on her way into the cafe, where she handed a plaster statuette to Tatarskij.
On the outside, this military blogger looked like himself. There must have been around 200 grams of TNT inside.
Traveled to Georgia?
The police have searched the 26-year-old’s apartment, writes Moskovskij Komsomolets, one of Russia’s largest newspapers.
They quote some of her friends as saying that she is “a typical St. Petersburg girl: dyed hair, weird clothes and things like that.” When the war broke out, she is said to have traveled to Georgia, before returning half a year later.
The 26-year-old is now wanted in Russia. But the Russian Interior Ministry is keeping open the possibility that she may have been tricked.
The Russian newspaper RBK writes on Monday that the investigation does not rule out that she may have been unaware that the statuette contained explosives. An investigation source tells the newspaper that they have established that the suspect and the person killed have had several points of contact in the past.
Criticizes the West
Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Monday paid tribute to the dead military blogger as “a guardian of the truth”.
– Russian journalists are constantly exposed to threats of reprisals from the Kyiv regime, says the ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Telegram.
At the same time, she attacks the West, which she believes has double standards.
– The lack of Western condemnation in light of their repeated concerns for the safety of journalists and the free press speaks for itself.
