A well-known pro-Russian military blogger died and 25 other people were injured this Sunday in an explosion in a cafeteria in Saint Petersburg (Russia) that would have belonged to the restaurant businessman and head of the Wagner Group, Yevgueni Prigozhin, according to the local newspaper Fontanka.
“The force of the explosive device was more than 200 grams of TNT (trinitrotoluene),” a source from the security forces and bodies told the official TASS agency.
The governor of Saint Petersburg, Alexandr Beglov, explained that there are at least 25 injured, of which 19 are hospitalized. The Ministry of the Interior, for its part, confirmed that the person who died is the well-known war correspondent Vladlen Tatarski.
The moment of an explosion in a cafe in St. Petersburg. Propagandist Vladlen Tatarsky held an event there. He is reportedly killed and six others were wounded. pic.twitter.com/lWijn522qN
— NOËL 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 (@NOELreports) April 2, 2023
Russian authorities have opened a criminal case for “murder in a generally dangerous manner”. According to Fontanka, the cafeteria often hosts events on weekends by Cyber Front Z, which is believed to be associated with Prigozhin and which, according to the Institute for Strategic Study (ISD), is a troll factory that is being used to promote Russian propaganda on social media.
The St. Petersburg newspaper indicates that, according to an announcement published on the VKontakte social network, the Russian Facebook, This Sunday, one of these events was held with Tatarski at the address where the cafeteria is located.
“It is known that the cafeteria previously belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.
According to Fontanka, citing witnesses to the explosion, one of the guests – presumably a woman – brought the war correspondent a statuette containing the explosive that exploded.
The official agency RÍA Nóvosti affirms that the gift was examined before it was delivered to the military blogger, who knew the woman, since she had given him postcards on several occasions at similar events.
According to the independent media Meduza, Tatarski is a blogger and one of the most famous military correspondents, who gained fame during the Russian military campaign in Ukraine.
He was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and fought in 2014 in the self-proclaimed people’s republic. He had more than 560,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel.
The attack against the pro-Russian military blogger is reminiscent of the one who killed Darya Dugin, daughter of the leader of the Neo-Eurasianist Movement, Alexandr Dugin, considered close to the Kremlin, in August.
The Russian journalist died when a bomb exploded in the underbody of her vehicle as she was driving on a road on the outskirts of Moscow. The Russian authorities accused the Ukrainian secret services of being behind the attack, a point that the kyiv government flatly denied.
#Video #shows #bomb #attack #Petersburg #killed #proRussian #blogger