Darya Trepova: What we know about the Russian cafe bomber

  • Published
Related topics
Darya TrepovaImage source, jj.ooee/VK
Image caption,

Darya is said to have worked in a vintage clothes shop in St Petersburg

Darya Trepova will spend 27 years in a Russian jail as a terrorist for killing pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky with a concealed bomb in a cafe in St Petersburg.

It is one of the harshest sentences handed to a woman in Russia.

There is no doubt about the 26-year-old's anti-war views - she was reportedly detained at a protest early on - but friends and family have said she was not radical and not capable of murder.

So what do we know about her?

An acquaintance told the BBC that she went to school in the town of Pushkin outside St Petersburg, adding that she "didn't seem to have any political views then".

Other sources say she later enrolled at St Petersburg state university's medical faculty, and she is not believed to have finished her course.

Image source, jj.ooee/VK
Image caption,

A picture from a social media profile of Darya Trepova

According to another friend, she worked for a long time at a vintage clothes shop in the city, but left her job to move to Moscow, a month before the cafe blast.

The friend said she was a supporter of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny, and also described her as "easy to deceive".

"There were many situations where Dasha, because she was so trusting and open to people, ended up in various unpleasant situations," she told Mediazona website.

On the cafe blast, Trepova told her trial she was following instructions from a man in Ukraine. She told the court she had been gullible and naive to believe him.

Trepova is married to Dmitry Rylov, but friends have described their marriage as a sham and a "joke" and said they were really just friends.

She told the Mediazona website herself that she found the idea of anniversaries "romantic" but did not want to live a "full married life".

The pair were both arrested at an anti-war rally on 24 February 2022, at the start of the invasion of Ukraine.

Trepova was detained for 10 days, apparently for ignoring police requests for the crowd to disperse.

Media caption,

Watch: The moments leading up to St Petersburg cafe explosion

Mr Rylov is said to be a member of a small fringe opposition group called the Libertarian Party, which was involved in the demonstrations.

He is thought to have emigrated when the Russian government announced plans to mobilise men of military age.

The party told the Telegram channel SOTA that Trepova had no connection to it, and that it condemned Tatarsky's killing.

Mr Rylov is also said to be wanted in connection with Tatarsky's killing.

Last week, he wrote a so-called "open letter" on Twitter, also known as X, in which he urged a Ukrainian journalist who Trepova has accused of being involved to come forward.

"I ask you to tell me how it all happened ... Show screenshots of your correspondence," Mr Rylov said.

"I am almost the only person who is worried about Dasha's imprisonment and who wants her to be free," he went on.

He added that his wife was "the most dear person in the world to me", and he would fight for her to "be warm, not hungry, protected and one day free".

Image source, MVD.RU
Image caption,

Darya Trepova's details were added to the interior ministry's wanted list hours before she was detained