Moscow: He bragged about being a cold-blooded killer, and videotaped battles with his helmet cam.

And along the way, this former car wash worker became an unlikely, pro-Kremlin media star in rebel-held Ukraine - where he met his end late Sunday in a mysterious explosion that roared up the elevator shaft in his apartment building.

The death of Arsen Pavlov, 33, better known by his nom de guerre "Motorola,"   triggered accusations on both sides of the conflict between Ukraine's Western-allied government and rebel factions with ties to Russia.

Pavlov first became known for strapping a GoPro camera to his helmet and then passing the footage to pro-Kremlin media outlets including LifeNews and Komsomolskaya Pravda. He granted generous access to friendly journalists, producing some of the best-known, and most infamous, videotaped scenes from the war.

One showed his fighters capturing Ukrainian soldiers at the airport in Donetsk. The men were later paraded through Donetsk, where locals threw stones and beat them, which Kiev called a violation of the Geneva Convention. A longer cut of the video, which we won't link to here, shows Pavlov dragging the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers out of the trunk of a car as another soldier covers his face in the background.

After the battle, he also brought captives to the airport to gather the bodies of their fallen comrades. According to a report by the Reuters news agency, he said they had been assigned the task because "it's not our job to recover dead bodies, it's our job to make them."

Many believed the blast that killed Motorola was just the latest in a series of killings that may be linked to a bitter internal purge of rebel leaders. Separatist officials, in turn claimed Ukraine's government in Kiev was behind the attack in Donetsk, the largest rebel-held city.

A video surfaced Monday on social media purportedly from anti-rebel factions showing a self-proclaimed fighter saying he was in Donetsk and claiming they "just liquidated the famous terrorist Motorola." He then lists two other pro-Moscow leaders as "next" on the hit list, and ends with a Nazi salute. The authenticity of the video could be independently verified, but separatists insisted it proved Kiev's hand in the attack.

Pavlov, a native of the northern Russian Komi Republic, arrived in Kiev during the 2013-2014 pro-European protests, and later joined anti-Western street demonstrations in Kharkiv and Donetsk. Reported to be a veteran of Russia's Second Chechen War, he led teams of separatist fighters in the extended battles for the Ukrainian city of Slavyansk and at the Donetsk Airport.

Kiev has called Pavlov a war criminal. Asked by the Kyiv Post last April about allegations that he had executed a Ukrainian defender of the airport, Pavlov responded: "I don't give a f*** about what I am accused of, believe it or not. I shot 15 prisoners dead. I don't give a f***. No comment. I kill if I want to. I don't if I don't."

He "was one of the first to understand that the information component of this war was perhaps just as important as the combat," wrote Alexander Kots, a war reporter for the pro-government daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, adding that Pavlov liked "Russian rap and joking around" and that his friends called him "Motik."

In July 2014, he arranged one of the most bizarre events of the war up to that point: His own wedding, attended by members of Russian and Western media, that highlighted the manic, tragicomic (and highly media-sensitive) atmosphere of Donetsk in early 2014.

One week later, a Malaysian airliner carrying 298 passengers and crew was shot from the sky. A two-year, Dutch-led investigation last month said that the missile-launcher "came from Russia" and was fired from territory held by the separatists.

On Monday, an 11-second video appeared in which men who said they are members of the neo-Nazi "Misanthropic Division," claimed responsibility for the attack. The claim could not immediately be verified.

On Monday, Russian state television aired glowing obituaries to Pavlov and his role in the breakaway Donetsk People's Republic, or DNR. Others responded with gallows humour.

"The DNR fighter has changed his codename from "Motorola" to Samsung Galaxy Note 7," joked one anti-Kremlin account, in reference to the Samsung's exploding telephones.

Washington Post