Internal Affairs Ministry posts video of officers who caught suspect in Prilepin car bomb attack; Ukraine equivocates about responsibility for the blast
Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry published a video featuring the Nizhny Novgorod police officers who caught a man suspected of blowing up writer Zakhar Prilepin’s car yesterday. In the clip, officers Ekaterina Sirotina, Dmitry Voyevodin, and Alexander Sokolov detail the arrest of 29-year-old Alexander Permyakov near the village of Kozlovo.
Voyevodin says:
The person in question emerged from the forest. Our service transport vehicle was located directly at the exit from the village of Kozlovo. The person emerged, was stopped by police officers, me and two of my colleagues, and we established the citizen’s identity. The person aroused suspicion. Initially, this person told us things that can’t be true: that he was catching partridges at a pond in the area. But there’s no lake in the area, and there are currently no partridges there either.
Officer Sokolov added that, “He had two passports in his wallet, one from Ukraine, and the other Russian. We started talking and talking with him, and in the end he confessed.”
Internal Affairs Ministry media
Earlier on May 7, Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry called the attempt on Zakhar Prilepin’s life a “terrorist act, organized and carried out by the Kyiv regime, with their Western handlers backing them.”
“The responsibility for this and other terrorist attacks lies not just with the Ukrainian authorities, but with their Western patrons, chiefly the U.S., who have painstakingly nurtured an anti-Russian project in Ukraine, culminating in neo-Nazism, since the coup d’état of February 2014,” says a Ministry statement. The statement added that Washington’s failure to condemn the attack “speaks for itself.”
Ukrainian intelligence services told news outlet Ukrainian Pravda, “Officially, we can neither confirm nor deny the involvement of Ukraine’s Security Services in this or that explosion that might happen to the occupiers and their henchmen,” adding that “We can discuss who is behind this or that incident after our victory. Which is definitely coming soon.”
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak called the attack on Prilepin “a Russian attempt at internal escalation.”
“Such incidents should influence the elites a bit. To make it so they won’t start thinking about how to get out of this situation without Putin, for example,” Podolyak said.
On May 6, nationalist writer and politician Zakhar Prilepin’s car exploded in the Nizhny Novgorod region, injuring Prilepin and killing his driver.