KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine’s police chief said on Monday he suspects Russian involvement in the murder of former parliamentary speaker Andriy Parubiy after a suspect was detained.
National police head Ivan Vyhivskyi said the gunman had disguised himself as a courier and fired eight times during Saturday’s attack in the western city of Lviv.
“He spent a long time preparing, watching, planning, and finally pulling the trigger … There is Russian involvement,” he said on Facebook, without providing evidence.
Vadym Onyshchenko, regional head of Ukraine’s SBU domestic intelligence agency, said that possibility was being investigated but evidence proving it had not been gathered yet.
Russia has not commented on the incident or responded to the accusation of involvement, and there has been no indication why the 54-year-old Parubiy was targeted.
He had served as parliamentary speaker from 2016-2019 and helped lead protests in 2013-14 that led to the ousting of Ukraine’s then pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovich.
Parubiy was also secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council from February to August 2014, a period when Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula and Moscow-backed separatists began fighting government forces in eastern Ukraine.
‘HORRIFIC’
Both countries have accused each other of attempted or successful assassinations during their war, including a senior Russian general blown up in Moscow and a Ukrainian intelligence colonel gunned down in Kyiv in July.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday it was “a horrific murder” that impacted “security in a country at war”.
The suspected shooter was detained overnight in the Khmelnytskyi region, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.
“I will only say that the crime was carefully planned: the victim’s movements were studied, a route was mapped out, and an escape plan was thought through,” he said on Telegram.
The suspect was a 52-year-old resident of Lviv, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Police published two photographs from the arrest showing special forces officers holding a shirtless, handcuffed man.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Editing by Alex Richardson, Gareth Jones and Andrew Cawthorne)
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