18-year-old man arrested on suspicion of the murder of Iryna Farion • “Be well prepared”
Iryna Farion was shot in the head outside her home in Lviv in western Ukraine last Friday.
The killer was caught on a surveillance camera running away, and the police wanted a “thin man in his 20s”.
An intensive manhunt was launched and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that all leads were being investigated, “even leads to Russia”.
Controversial voice
For most of her career, both as a professor of linguistics and as a member of parliament, 60-year-old Iryna Farion has urged Ukrainians to ditch Russian in favor of Ukrainian, to reduce Russian influence in the country.
Last year she said that Ukrainian soldiers who speak Russian should call themselves Russians, a statement that got her temporarily kicked out of her university.
Russian social media profiles have interpreted her rhetoric as wanting to “exterminate Russian-speaking Ukrainians”, and one of the profiles wrote after the murder that she has now been exterminated herself.
Ukrainian investigators have found no clear links between the 18-year-old suspect and Russia, but Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said shortly after the arrest that the shooter was “just a dispatcher” and that the attack was believed to have been coordinated by others.
Rented three apartments
The 18-year-old suspect was arrested at his home in Dnipro, 90 miles from the scene of the murder, after a six-day manhunt.
At the time of the murder, he was wearing a black sun hat, red football shirt and red gloves. And according to the investigation, those weren’t the only clothes and accessories he had prepared with. He is suspected of having ordered disguises since May.
– We traced the orders from his phone and found that he received the deliveries in Lviv, says Minister of the Interior Ihor Klymenko.
The 18-year-old is believed to have gone to Iryna Farion’s hometown at least two weeks before the murder. Her neighbors have said that they saw a person matching his description sitting on a bench near her home for around two weeks.
According to the investigation, he had short-term rented three apartments in Lviv before the murder.
The father: “Be a patriot”
The investigators suspect that the 18-year-old planned to kill another person. They don’t want to go into who it is, but the 18-year-old is said to have had links and searches that indicate he mapped him carefully.
– Despite his young age, he was well prepared and had gathered a lot of information, says one of the investigators.
The 18-year-old’s father, who is fighting in the Ukrainian army, has spoken Radio Liberty that his son was a patriot who had taken preparatory courses to become a drone pilot in the Ukrainian army.
– He had no anti-Ukrainian views, the father tells the radio channel.
He also does not understand how his son could afford to rent three apartments in Lviv.