Ministry of Internal Affairs of UkraineAn 18-year-old man has been arrested in south-eastern Ukraine on suspicion of shooting dead Iryna Farion, a controversial former MP and linguistics professor.
The teenager was arrested in Dnipro, more than 900km (550 miles) from the western city of Lviv where the attack took place, after a manhunt involving a large team of investigators.
Farion, 60, is well known across Ukraine for causing a wave of protests last year when she said that truly patriotic Ukrainians should not speak Russian under any circumstances because it was the language of the “invading state”.
She was expelled from the university after being charged with inciting hatred, before being reinstated by a court in Lviv this year.
Her murder is believed to have been targeted and although surveillance cameras did not capture the shooting outside her home, they are believed to have captured images of the suspect, described as a thin young man.
Farion’s funeral drew a large crowd on Monday in Lviv. She was a member of parliament for two years until 2014, appeared regularly on TV and her YouTube blog had more than 300,000 subscribers.
The motive for the attack remains unclear and President Volodymyr Zelensky said detectives were considering all potential lines of inquiry, including the possibility that Russia had a role in the killing.
One report suggested that a neo-Nazi group with links to Russia may have been involved in the incident, and a member of the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party claimed that whoever opened fire had orders from Russia.
There was no indication of Russian involvement, although pro-Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan pointed out on social media that Farion had sought to “completely eliminate” Ukraine’s Russian-speaking community and that she herself had been eliminated.
beautiful picturesUkrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Thursday that the teenage suspect was being held at his home in Dnipro, adding that the suspect had rented at least three apartments in Lviv before the shooting.
A local website identified the suspect as a young soccer player who participated in a tournament last month.
The interior minister praised the “139 hours of continuous work” by investigators and crime experts who meticulously examined the shooter’s escape route as well as 100 hectares of forest.
In a statement on the Telegram messaging service, Mr Klymenko said the investigation “tends to believe that the shooter was the only perpetrator”, suggesting that the incident may have been coordinated by others.
The suspect’s father told Radio Liberty he was on the front lines and had not seen his son for some time.
However, he said the teenager had no anti-Ukrainian views and was a patriot who had completed military preparation courses.
