The woman who has been arrested in the bombing death of a popular pro-war blogger in Russia was at least a casual supporter of the country’s opposition, according to a friend, court records and local news reports.
Russian investigators arrested Daria Trepova, a 26-year-old native of St. Petersburg, on Monday in connection with the killing of the blogger known as Vladlen Tatarsky, who died in an explosion while giving a talk in the city the previous night.
Investigators said the explosion was caused by a bomb concealed inside a statuette. A video posted by the Russian police showed a woman they identified as Ms. Trepova admitting that she had taken the statuette into the event after receiving it from another person, whom she did not identify.
Russian officials described Mr. Trepova as an “agent” of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny and said she had carried out the attack in collaboration with Ukrainian intelligence agencies, without offering evidence. An exiled leader of Mr. Navalny’s movement, Ivan Zhdanov, denied the allegations and said they were a pretext to extend Mr. Navalny’s prison term.
A friend of Ms. Trepova’s, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said the young woman did support Mr. Navalny, Russia’s most popular opposition leader, but said she would not describe her as a committed activist. The friend shared the belief of many friends and relatives of Ms. Trepova who wrote on social media that they did not believe she would knowingly participate in a plot to kill Mr. Tatarsky.
Ms. Trepova, who recently moved to Moscow, had attended Mr. Navalny’s rallies, according to her friend, and online records show that Ms. Trepova had signed up to receive information about candidates through an electoral initiative run by the opposition leader.
Russian court records also show that a woman with the same name and birth date as Ms. Trepova received a 10-day jail term last year for participating in a protest on the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
Ms. Trepova’s friend, who last spoke to her a week before Mr. Tatarsky’s death, said she recognized Ms. Trepova from a photo of the event that was released on social media. A video of the event that circulated on social media on Monday shows the same woman being addressed by Mr. Tatarsky as “Nastya” and sitting at the front of the room but off to the side as he opened a box holding a statuette.
Photos and videos from the event show the person believed to be Ms. Trepova with hair past her shoulders. In the video released by the police, she has shorter hair. The reason for the discrepancy was not clear.
Ms. Trepova previously attended St. Petersburg State University and worked as a sales clerk in a vintage shop there before moving to Moscow earlier this year, the friend said.
A Russian tabloid, Moskovskiy Komsomolets, reported that Ms. Trepova was married to a member of the Russian Libertarian Party, which opposes Mr. Putin, but the two were not close and did not live together, the tabloid said.
The man identified as her husband, Dmitry Rylov, told a Russian libertarian news outlet that Ms. Trepova had not known what was inside the statue and that she had been set up by the people who handed it to her.
Mr. Rylov was not immediately reachable for comment. The Russian news reports about the marriage could not be independently verified.
Ekaterina Bodyagina and Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.