Moscow car bombing:Daughter of Putin Brain killed

 Image Source : AP/ANI

Daria Dugina, 29, the daughter of an ultra-nationalist Russian theoretician who advocates Russia annexing Ukraine, has been killed in a car bomb attack outside Moscow, Russian state investigators said today.

Darya Dugina, daughter of prominent ideologue Alexander Dugin, was killed after a suspected explosive device detonated on the Toyota Land Cruiser she was travelling in, investigators from the Moscow region said in a statement.

It is thought her father, the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is known as "Putin's brain", may have been the intended target of the attack.

Mr Dugin is a prominent ultra-nationalist ideologue who is believed to be close to the Russian president.

A person who knew Ms. Dugina, Andrei Krasnov, was quoted by the Russian state news agency TASS as claiming that the vehicle belonged to her father and that he was likely the intended victim.

According to the Russian official tabloid Rossiiskaya Gazeta, Dugin made the last-minute decision to switch cars as the father and daughter were visiting a festival outside of Moscow.

Investigators were seen in TV footage gathering wreckage and shards from the explosion's site.

Darya Dugina was described as a journalist and political expert by investigators, who said they had opened a murder case and would be conducting forensic investigations to attempt to figure out exactly what had happened.

When determining who committed the crime, they claimed to be taking "all stories" into account.

Darya's father, Alexander Dugin, has long promoted the federation of Russian-speaking and other nations into a sizable new Russian empire.

He wants that empire to extend to Ukraine, where Russian forces are presently engaged in demilitarising that country in what Moscow refers to as a "special military operation."

Some Russia watchers claim that Mr. Dugin has tremendous influence over Russian President Vladimir Putin, while others claim that his impact is modest. Mr. Dugin is on a US sanctions list.

The US Treasury said in a statement in March that Mr. Dugin, the head editor of the United World International website, had been added to its list of sanctioned individuals because he had claimed that Ukraine would "perish" if joined to the NATO military alliance.

Darya Dugina, who also went by the surname Platonova and was reported by Russian state media to be 30 years old, broadly supported her father's ideas and appeared on state TV in her own right to offer support for Russia's actions in Ukraine.