An 18-year-old man has been arrested in Dnipro, eastern Ukraine, on suspicion of the murder of former ultra-nationalist MP Irina Farion, Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday. Farion was fatally shot in the head on the evening of July 19 while walking down a street in Lviv, in the west of the country. “The arrest operation was very difficult. Hundreds of specialists from the National Police of Ukraine, the SBU, and the police were involved in the attack,” Zelensky said. [Servicio de Seguridad] and other services have been working over the past few days to clarify the murder,” Zelensky said on social media.
The Interior Ministry said in a statement that there was sufficient evidence to confirm that the detainee, a native of Dnieper, a city 140 kilometres north of kyiv, was the one who shot the politician, who was also a linguist and professor at the Lviv Polytechnic University.
The investigation has not yet clarified the motive for the crime, but it is leaning towards the theory that the shooter was only a hired killer. The authorities are analyzing whether there is a Russian conspiracy behind the murder, a motivation related to the victim’s public activity, or revenge.
However, the political motive hypothesis gained strength on Friday, as Interior Minister Igor Klimenko revealed that the detainee had a list on his mobile phone containing the names of Farion and Maksim Bukhansky, a deputy from Zelensky’s Sluga Narodu (Servant of the People) party, which has an absolute majority in the Ukrainian parliament. “Specialists have examined the phone; there were names of other politicians,” Klimenko told reporters. Among those politicians were members of regional parliaments, but the minister refused to give any more names.
Police investigations claim that the politician was shot from a distance of about two metres with a modified pistol, and a cartridge was found at the scene. The weapon has not been found. As to the motives that may have led the suspect to choose Farion for his first murder, Klimenko believes that she was probably the easiest target.
Authorities are also investigating the suspected killer’s possible connection to a Russian neo-Nazi group that claimed responsibility for the crime days later in a four-minute video in which it called Farion a “stinking race traitor.”
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A crime prepared for two months
Minister Klimenko explained that the young man had been preparing for the murder of Farion for at least two months. “We followed his movements, we followed how he changed his clothes, how he changed his way of walking, how he changed his routes, how he changed his place of residence at least three times,” he explained.
Ivan Vyhivskyi, the head of the National Police, also confirmed the arrest. “The painstaking and large-scale work of hundreds of police officers: sleepless nights, thousands of people checked, hundreds of kilometres travelled and hectares of forest examined and dozens of gigabytes of video analysed paid off: the police found and arrested the killer of Irina Farion in the city of Dnipro,” he said in a statement posted on social media.
Farion was a highly controversial politician. A member of the Ukrainian ultra-party Svoboda (Freedom) since 2005, she was elected as a deputy for Lviv after the 2012 elections, but failed to win a seat in the 2014 elections. She was dismissed from the university, where she was a lecturer in the Department of Languages, due to controversial comments she made last November about the soldiers of the Azov battalion, considered heroes in Ukraine, whom she accused of not being patriotic enough because they speak Russian. Last May, an appeals court reinstated Farion to her university duties.
In order to arrest the suspect, the operational services, criminal analysis units and investigations worked non-stop for 139 hours, Klimenko said: “Units of the National Police and the National Guard combed 100 hectares of territory. Hundreds of witnesses were interviewed and tens of terabytes of information from hundreds of surveillance cameras were processed and decrypted. About 58,000 people of the suspect’s age leaving our country were checked at the border.”
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