A suspect in the fatal shooting of prominent Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy has been arrested, the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said.
The 54-year-old parliamentarian was killed by an attacker posing as a courier in the western city of Lviv on Saturday, sparking a manhunt.
Ukraine’s interior minister Igor Klymenko said in a statement issued in the early hours of Monday morning that the suspect had been detained in the western Khmelnytskyi region.
Parubiy rose to prominence during Ukraine’s Euromaidan mass protests, which advocated closer ties with the EU and brought down pro-Russian former President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
Klymenko said the preliminary investigation had found the killing had been “carefully prepared” with Parubiy’s travel schedule and route mapped out, as well as an escape plan.
He added that Ukraine’s national police force would provide further details later.
In a social media post, Zelensky said he had spoken to chief prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko who advised that the suspect had given an initial testimony.
“Urgent investigative actions are currently underway to establish all the circumstances of this murder,” he added, while also thanking law enforcement and prosecutors for “working around the clock”.
Unverified footage, purportedly of the shooting, appeared to show a gunman dressed as a courier approaching Parubiy on the street and holding up a weapon as he walked behind him.
At a news briefing on Saturday, Lviv police chief Oleksandr Shliakhovskyi said the attacker had “fired about eight shots from a firearm”.
Sources inside Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies told the BBC that the attacker had dressed to look like a worker from delivery company Glovo. The company said it was “deeply shocked” by the crime and would co-operate fully with an investigation.
Parubiy was the speaker of the country’s parliament from April 2016 to August 2019.
He was one of the leaders of demonstrations in 2013-14 which called for closer ties with the European Union. He organised its “self-defence” teams who guarded the sprawling tent camp in the heart of the capital Kyiv during the protest.
