Ukraine has detained an 18-year-old man over the killing of a prominent former nationalist lawmaker who was shot and killed this month, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday.
Iryna Farion, 60, who served as an MP for ultra-nationalist Svoboda party, was shot in the head near her flat in the western city of Lviv on July 19.
A divisive but admired figure, she regularly chided officials and military personnel for speaking Russian instead of Ukrainian.
“An 18-year-old boy has been detained,” Zelensky wrote on Telegram, saying Interior Minister Igor Klymenko had just informed him of the development.
Farion was a professor at Lviv’s Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences, specialising in the Ukrainian language, and taught online classes.
She was also a YouTube blogger and frequently appeared on television.
She was fired from her academic post last year after students protested comments Farion made in a television interview, when she had insulted some military brigades, including the revered Azov unit, where soldiers speak Russian.
A court later ordered her reinstatement.
Farion’s funeral was held in Lviv on Monday, with mourners filling the streets.
Supporters also heaped flowers at the spot where she was shot, where a blood stain was still visible.
The suspected killer was detained in the eastern city of Dnipro, Klymenko wrote on Telegram, posting a picture of a camouflaged officer handcuffing a bare-chested man face-down on the floor next to a sofa bed.
“There is sufficient evidence to claim that it was the detainee who shot the linguist,” Klymenko said.
He said that investigators traced the suspect’s escape route and “searched about 100 hectares of forest”, or 250 acres.
“Eventually, the suspect was tracked down. We identified him. Having his photo, it was only a matter of time: smart surveillance cameras caught him everywhere,” Klymenko said.
“In preparation for the crime, he rented at least three apartments in Lviv,” he added.
“Currently, the investigation is inclined to believe that the shooter is only the perpetrator” and acted on orders, Klymenko said, promising to release more information.
The Ukrainska Pravda news site reported Sunday that Farion was shot while waiting for a taxi to go to her daughter’s home for dinner.
Klymenko said after her murder that the main motives being considered were her “public or political activity, and also personal dislike”.
