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Darya Trepova in court in Saint Petersburg
Photo: Dmitri Lovetsky / AP
A court in Saint Petersburg has sentenced the young Russian Daria Trepova to 27 years in prison for the fatal assassination attempt on the nationalist and military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky.
Last April, Trepova gave Tatarsky a bust filled with explosives in a bar in St. Petersburg, which then exploded.
Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, was killed in the explosion and more than 50 people in the cafe were injured.
Trepova remained uninjured.
The court convicted the 26-year-old of a terrorist attack, illegal possession of explosives and falsifying documents, as Russian agencies reported.
The public prosecutor's office had demanded 28 years in prison.
Another man, who is said to have briefly given her shelter, was sentenced to one year and nine months in a camp.
Trepova said she was tricked into thinking the statue contained a listening device and not a bomb.
She admitted giving the statue to Tatarsky.
She didn't know anything about a bomb.
Trepova also repeated this statement before the court in St. Petersburg, where she has had to stand trial since November.
According to the Russian judiciary, the masterminds of the attack on Tatarsky are based in Ukraine.
Trepova's husband recently accused a Russian journalist living in Kiev of using false pretenses to frame his wife and turning her into a living bomb.
Tatarsky was a well-known supporter of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
He belonged to a group of activists and bloggers known in Russia as "war correspondents" who mix front-line reporting with propaganda.
Tatarsky had hundreds of thousands of followers and was invited to the Kremlin in September 2022.
He sent his fans a bloodthirsty video message from Saal: “We will defeat everyone, kill everyone, and plunder whoever we want.
Everything will be the way we like it.” Tatarsky called his Ukrainian opponents “faggots” or “pigs.”
slü/aeh/dpa/Reuters