TALLINN, Estonia (AP) – The car of a prominent pro-Kremlin writer exploded in Russia on Saturday, injuring him and killing his driver, Russia’s state news agency Tass reported, citing emergency and law enforcement officials.

The car incident of Zakhar Prilepin, a well-known nationalist writer and ardent supporter of what the Kremlin calls a “military special operation” in Ukraine, took place in the Nizhny Novgorod region, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) east of Moscow.

It is the third blast involving prominent pro-Kremlin figures since the start of the war in Ukraine.

In August 2022, a car bomb attack on the outskirts of Moscow killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of an influential Russian political theorist often referred to as “Putin’s brain”. Authorities claimed that Ukraine was behind the blast.

Last month, popular military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in an explosion at a cafe in St. Petersburg. Officials again blamed Ukrainian intelligence agencies.

Niznhy Novgorod regional governor Gleb Nikitin said Prilepin suffered minor fractures and is receiving medical attention.

Russian news agency RBC, citing unnamed sources, reported that Prilepin was traveling back to Moscow from the partially occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine on Saturday, stopping in the Nizhny Novgorod region for a meal.

Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk said a suspect had been arrested. Russian news reports identified him as a native of Ukraine who had previously been convicted of robbery.

Prilepin became a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014 after Putin illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula. He was involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine alongside the Russian-backed separatists. Last year he was sanctioned by the European Union for his support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In 2020 he founded a political party, For the Truth, which according to Russian media reports was backed by the Kremlin. A year later, Prilepin’s party merged with the nationalist Fair Russia party, which has seats in parliament.

As co-chair of the newly formed party, Prilepin won but relinquished a seat in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, in the 2021 election.

Party leader Sergei Mironov called Saturday’s incident “an act of terrorism” and blamed Ukraine. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova echoed Mironov’s view in a post on messaging app Telegram, adding that responsibility also rests with the US and NATO.

“Washington and NATO have nurtured another international terrorist cell – the Kiev regime,” Zakharova wrote. “Direct responsibility of the US and UK. We pray for Zakhar.”

The Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, former President Dmitry Medvedev, in a telegram to Prilepin, blamed “Nazi extremists”.

Ukrainian officials have not directly commented on the allegations. However, Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Mykhailo Podolyak appeared to point the finger at the Kremlin in a tweet on Saturday, saying that “in order to prolong the agony of Putin’s clan and maintain the illusion of ‘total control’, the Russian repressive machinery picking up pace and catching up with everyone,” including supporters of the Ukraine war.

Iran on Saturday, May 6 executed Iranian-Swedish dissident Habib Chaab, who was sentenced to death for “terrorism,” according to the Iranian judiciary, who have accused him of being the leader of an Arab separatist group in the west of the country. The court upheld his death sentence on March 12.

“The death sentence against Habib Chaab (…), leader of the terrorist group Harakat al-Nidal, was carried out this morning,” the judiciary agency Mizan Online said on Saturday. Executions in Iran are usually carried out by hanging at dawn.

Sweden, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, condemned the execution. “The death penalty is an inhuman and irreversible punishment and Sweden, like the rest of the EU, condemns its use in all circumstances,” Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said on Twitter.

According to human rights organizations, which put the number of executions at 582 in 2022, Iran is the country with the highest number of executions after China.

Disappear in Istanbul

Around 50-year-old Habib Chaab, also known as Habib Asyud, is portrayed by the Iranian authorities as the leader of the group Harakat al-Nidal or ASMLA (Arab Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz), which describes this movement as a “terrorist”.

He went missing in October 2020 after going to Istanbul before reappearing a month later in prison in Iran.

In December 2020, Turkish authorities announced the arrest of 11 people suspected of kidnapping him in Istanbul before taking him to Van on the Iranian border and handing him over to authorities in Tehran.

Iranian television had broadcast a video of Habib Chaab in November 2020, in which he specifically accused himself of a deadly attack aimed at a military parade in September 2018 in Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan province (south-west of the country). , and to work for the Saudi intelligence services.

The distribution of such videos is common in Iran and has been condemned by human rights defenders, who accuse the authorities of obtaining them through torture.

The population of the oil-rich province of Khuzestan has a large Arab minority who lament being abandoned by the authorities. At the end of 2019, Khuzestan was one of the focal points of a wave of protests that were violently suppressed.

Last March, the judiciary sentenced to death six men accused of being members of the ASMLA and accusing them of “following the orders of their European leaders like (…) Habib Chaab”.

After the dissident’s arrest, Sweden had taken steps to offer him consular assistance, but to no avail as Iran does not recognize dual citizenship.

Habib Chaab “was a resident of Sweden for many years and benefited from the facilities and resources of that country’s government and security apparatus,” Mizan told Online in March.

Other Europeans convicted

In January, Tehran sparked a wave of international outrage when it executed a former defense official, Iranian-British Alireza Akbari, who had been convicted of espionage.

In February, Germany expelled two diplomats stationed in Berlin to protest the death sentence on Iranian-German dissident Jamshid Sharmahd, which was upheld in April. He is accused of taking part in an attack on a mosque in Shiraz, southern Iran, in April 2008 that killed 14 people.

At least 16 Western passport holders, including six French nationals, are being held in Iran, most of them with dual nationality.

Among them is Iranian academic Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish resident who was arrested during a visit to Iran in April 2016 and sentenced to death in 2017 for spying for Israel. During his detention he received Swedish citizenship. According to his family, he is still on death row.

Iranian-Swedish relations are also strained by the case of Hamid Noury, a former Iranian prison official who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the first instance in Sweden for his role in the 1988 mass executions of prisoners ordered by Tehran.

His trial has angered Tehran, which regularly denounces “political” prosecutions and “baseless and fabricated allegations against Iran.”

With AFP