KIEV, June 16. /TASS/. The Kiev prosecutor’s office has opened a criminal case over detained suspect who may have been involved in the killing of Russia’s ex-legislator Denis Voronenkov last spring.
"Investigators from the office of Kiev’s prosecutor and security service SBU operatives on June 15 carried out a series of detective and investigative measures in the territory of the city of Pavlograd, the Dnepropetrovsk Region on June 15 to probe into the circumstances of the killing of former Russian State Duma member Denis Voronenkov. One person has been detained as a suspected accomplice," the prosecutor’s office said on its website without disclosing the man’s name.
"Currently investigative measures in relation of the detainee are being taken," the prosecutor’s office said.
Earlier, the police said that Prosecutor General’s officials and police held a special operation, which was part of the effort to investigate Voronenkov’s murder and to detain several suspected accomplices. Later the ringleader of the local nationalist vigilante group calling itself Pavlograd Self-Defense, Sergey Tishchenko, said on his Facebook page an activist of the Right Sector (outlawed in Russia) Yaroslav Tarasenko had been detained.
Former Russian State Duma member Denis Voronenkov in December 2014 was stripped of immunity in connection with a criminal case over a hostile takeover of a building in the center of Moscow. In October 2016 he emigrated to Ukraine. In February 2017 he faced formal charges of fraud and was put on the international wanted list.
On March 23, Voronenkov was gunned down in broad daylight in the center of Kiev seconds after he left the hotel where he lived in the company of a bodyguard. An unidentified attacker approached him and fired several shots. In the fire exchange between the killer and the bodyguard that followed both were injured and taken to hospital. The killer died shortly afterwards.