Teenager held over murder of Ukraine nationalist ex-MP Iryna Farion

An 18-year-old man has been arrested in south-east Ukraine on suspicion of shooting dead Iryna Farion, a controversial former MP and linguistics professor.

The teenager was tracked down in Dnipro, more than 900km (550 miles) from the western city of Lviv where the attack took place, after a murder hunt involving a large team of investigators.

Farion, 60, was well known in Ukraine for prompting an outcry last year when she said that true Ukrainian patriots should not speak Russian in any setting because it was the language of the “aggressor country”.

She was dismissed from her university after being accused of inciting hatred, before being reinstated by a court in Lviv this year.

Her murder was treated as premeditated and although CCTV cameras failed to film the shooting outside her home, they reportedly did capture an image of the suspect, described as a skinny young man.

Farion’s funeral attracted a big crowd on Monday in Lviv. She was an MP for two years until 2014, regularly appeared on TV and her YouTube blog had attracted more than 300,000 subscribers.

The motive for the attack was unclear and President Volodymyr Zelensky said detectives were considering all potential lines of inquiry, including a potential Russian role in the murder.

One report suggested a neo-Nazi group linked to Russia may have been involved and a member of the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party claimed that whoever fired the shot had taken orders from Russia.

There was no indication of Russian involvement, although pro-Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan pointed out on social media that Farion had sought the “complete elimination” of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population and had herself been eliminated.

Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Thursday that the teenaged suspect had been detained at his home in Dnipro, adding that he had rented at least three apartments in Lviv ahead of the shooting.

One local website identified the suspect as a young footballer who had taken part in a tournament last month.

The interior minister paid tribute to the “139 hours of continuous work” by investigators and crime specialists who had painstakingly checked the shooter’s escape route as well as 100 hectares of forest.

In a statement on the messaging service Telegram, Mr Klymenko said the investigation “was inclined to believe that the shooter is only a perpetrator”, indicating that it may have been co-ordinated by others.

The suspect’s father told Radio Liberty that he was on the front line and had not seen his son for some time.

However, he said the teenager had no anti-Ukrainian views and was a patriot who had completed courses in preparation for joining the army.