More than 500 activists rallied Tuesday in Moscow in memory of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and Novaya Gazeta journalist Anastasia Baburova slain a year ago, and several dozen of them were detained by police.
The two were gunned down by a masked gunman on a busy central street after attending a daytime news conference. Authorities in November arrested two suspects in the killing. Their trial is still pending.
Participants in Tuesday’s rally carried posters that read “To remember means to fight!” and “Fascism won’t pass!”
The rally was sanctioned by the authorities but banned from marching along a downtown boulevard. The demonstrators moved to ignore the ban, chanting “Fascists Kill, Authorities cover them up!” and riot police detained several dozen of them.
Activist Sergei Udaltsov said the demonstrators wanted to draw attention to authorities’ slow action against neo-Nazi and other extremist groups.
The main suspect detained in Markelov’s and Baburova’s deaths, Nikita Tikhonov, has admitted to killing them and insisted that he acted alone, his lawyer said in November.
The lawyer, Yevgeny Skripelev, also said his client had been motivated by personal animosity and was not linked to any ultranationalist groups. “There were no ideological differences behind it, just a personal grudge,” he said on Ekho Moskvy radio. Markelov had accused Tikhonov of involvement in the murder of a campaigner against hate crimes, Alexander Ryukhin, in southern Moscow in 2006.
(AP, MT)
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