A court in Moscow has converted Darya Trepova’s detention into arrest, at least until 2 June, accused of having carried out the attack in which journalist-blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in a Moscow cafe on Sunday. This is reported by Ria Novosti.
The 26-year-old was charged with a terrorist attack. “The Central Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of Russia has filed a charge against Darya Trepova” for terrorism. The Tass agency reports it. The woman is charged with “crimes under part 3 of article 205 of the Russian Criminal Code (terrorist attack committed by an organized group resulting in the intentional death of a person) and part 4 of article 222.1 (Acquisition, deposit illegal carrying and carrying of explosives and explosive devices in ;;an organized group)”. “The court has received a petition from the Investigative Committee to arrest Trepova,” added Tass, pointing out that the woman had arrived for the hearing in Moscow’s Basmanny court.
Bomb in St. Petersburg, ‘Street Food Bar’ destroyed after the explosion
Meanwhile the head of the Wagner private military company, Yevgeny Prigozhin, went today to the cafe in St. Petersburg where the attack on Tatarsky took place on Sunday and he met with activists of the nationalist group Cyber Front Z, who had organized Tatarsky’s conference. This was reported by Prigozhin’s Telegram channel, posting a video of the meeting. Prigozhin also posted a document certifying that Tatarsky has been recognized as a Wagner soldier, with all payments, indemnities and guarantees due to company members killed in battle.
THE RECONSTRUCTION
At the time of the explosion Trepova sat calmly no more than four or five meters from him. The detail, which emerged from a video released by the well-known dissident Ukrainian journalist Anatoly Shariy, could confirm that the woman did not know of the presence of the explosive in the statuette, as her husband said, according to which it was “framed and used” by someone. The woman’s pre-trial detention hearing is scheduled for today in the Basmanny District Court in Moscow. This was reported by CNN citing the Russian state news agency Vesti.
St. Petersburg attack, the alleged attacker enters the bar with a box
The video shows the woman who is about to leave after delivering the package with the statuette to Tatarsky. He calls her back using the name of Nastia, – short for Anastasia, the name with which she seems to have introduced herself to him – and invites her to sit not far from him, to her left. Then Tatarsky opens the package and takes out the bust, depicting a soldier. Shortly after the explosion occurs.
Darya Trepova also appears in another video, circulated among others by the Telegram Mash channel, where you can see the exterior of the café after the attack. Among the people, some bleeding, who wander around in shock, she can still be seen standing, looking around her and then walking away, apparently unharmed.
The delivery of the statuette would have been the proof that Darya Trepova had to pass in order to be able to be transferred to Kiev and work as a journalist in a local newspaper. This is what emerges from the interrogation to which she was subjected after her arrest, as reported by the independent Russian site Fontanka. According to Fontanka, Trepova, who was detained during a demonstration against the intervention in Ukraine last year, is a regular visitor to Ukrainian Telegram channels. Through one of them you said you came into contact with an unspecified activist who would have promised to have you transferred to Ukraine to work as a journalist. But first she had to undergo some tests to prove that she was capable of “fighting Russian propaganda”. According to the site, it is not excluded that the explosive was triggered remotely. Subsequently, the young woman was supposed to leave Russia with a plane ticket that had already been bought for a flight that yesterday she was supposed to reach Uzbekistan. From there she was promised that she would be taken to Ukraine.
When investigators asked her if she knew the statuette was actually a bomb, Trepova reportedly replied: “They didn’t tell me exactly, but I suspected something bad.” To then add: “They set me up”.