May 6 (AFP) - A prominent Russian nationalist writer, Zakhar Prilepin, was wounded in a car bombing that killed his driver on Saturday, an attack that Russia immediately blamed on Ukraine and the West.

The state Investigative Committee said the writer's Audi Q7 was blown up in a village in the Nizny Novgorod region, about 400 km (250 miles) east of Moscow, which it was treating as an act of terrorism. It said Prilepin had been taken to hospital.

The committee released a photograph showing the white vehicle lying overturned on a track next to a wood, with a deep crater beside it and fragments of metal strewn nearby.

An interior ministry spokeswoman said a suspect had been arrested. State news agency TASS quoted security sources as saying they had found an apartment in the Moscow region where they believed the bomb could have been assembled.

Prilepin, a novelist who is an outspoken champion of Russia's war in Ukraine and has boasted of taking part in military combat there, was the third prominent pro-war figure to be targeted by a bomb since Moscow's full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.