A former MP in Ukraine’s Parliament was assassinated on the street in broad daylight.
Iryna Farion was shot in the head next to a car park in the western city of Lviv on Friday, and died after being transported to a hospital.
Mystery is deepening about what happened during the attack happened as there was an electricity outage at the time.
This means CCTV in the area was affected, and there is no footage of the assault.
Footage of the aftermath shows a pool of blood left on the asphalt outside the entrance of a block of flats.
The gunman has not yet been identified, and a hunt has been launched to trace him.
Police pressed on through the night with a wide search for the man, but there are sill no clues in the case.
Interior minister Ihor Klymenko said investigators were for the moment linking the shooting either to Farion’s political activity or to a personal motive.
He stressed that ‘this was not a spontaneous killing’ and police were looking for a motive.
‘We already have several versions. The main ones, I can say, are [linked to Farion’s] social and political activities and personal dislike,’ Klymenko wrote on Telegram.
‘We do not rule out that the murder has a commissioned character,’ he added.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was receiving regular reports on efforts to capture the gunman. He said any act of violence was to be condemned.
The hardline nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) political party Farion was a member of blamed Russia for the killing.
‘Moscow shoots in the temple for the Ukrainian language,’ it said in a statement.
Farion, a linguist, became a member of the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party in 2005 and was elected to parliament in 2012, but failed in subsequent attempts to win a seat. She had also served on the Lviv regional council.
She gained prominence for frequent campaigns to promote the Ukrainian language and discredit public officials who spoke Russian.
In 2018, when Ukraine was fighting Russian-financed separatists who had seized territory in the east, she called for a drive to ‘punch every Russian-speaking person in the jaw’.
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