Russian police say they have arrested a woman suspected of delivering a bomb which killed a pro-Putin blogger in a St Petersburg cafe and injured at least 30 others.
Vladlen Tatarsky, 40, was killed as he was leading a discussion at the Street Bar cafe, allegedly after being handed a bust of himself as a gift which then exploded.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, the top state criminal investigation agency, said that Darya Tryopova was arrested on suspicion of involvement in Mr Tatarsky’s killing.
Ms Tryopova, a 26-year-old St. Petersburg resident, had been previously detained for taking part in anti-war rallies, according to Russian media.
Her arrest was initially reported late Sunday but Russian media reported she went on the run before being arrested Monday.
Russian authorities say they are investigating the attack in Russia’s second biggest city as a “high-profile murder” and had listed Ms Tryopova as a wanted person.
A video showed Mr Tatarsky making jokes about the bust and putting it on the table next to him just before the explosion.
Investigators are said to be looking into the statuette as a possible source of the blast, but also have not ruled out a bomb being placed in the cafe before the event.
Mr Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, had more than 560,000 followers on social network Telegram and was one of the most prominent of the influential military bloggers who have provided running commentary on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
No-one has declared responsibility for the explosion, with Russian military bloggers pointing the finger of blame at Ukraine - which is denied by Kyiv.
Some Russian commentators have compared the bombing to the killing last August of Darya Dugina, a nationalist TV commentator, who was killed in a car bomb outside Moscow.
Russian authorities blamed Ukraine’s military intelligence for Dugina’s death, but Kyiv denied involvement.
Reacting to the latest incident, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Tatarsky’s activities “have won him the hatred of the Kyiv regime”.
But a top Ukrainian government official cast the explosion that killed Mr Tatarsky as part of internal turmoil.
“Spiders are eating each other in a jar,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote in English on Twitter.
“Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”
Tatarsky was among hundreds of attendees at a lavish Kremlin ceremony last September to proclaim Russia’s annexation of four partly occupied regions of Ukraine - a move that most countries at the UN condemned as illegal.
“We’ll defeat everyone, we’ll kill everyone, we’ll rob everyone we need to. Everything will be as we like it,” he was shown saying in a video clip on that occasion.
The cafe in which Mr Tatarsky was killed, Street Food Bar No 1 near the River Neva, was once owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the infamous Wagner mercenary group which has taken part in much of the fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Prigozhin paid tribute to the pro-war blogger in a video which he claimed was filmed from the town hall in Bakhmut, which has witnessed heavy fighting.
