Russians Arrested at Memorials for Boris Nemtsov on Assassination Anniversary

Multiple people were arrested in cities across Russia as they paid tribute to the late opposition figure Boris Nemtsov on Thursday, the 10th anniversary of his assassination near the Kremlin.

In Moscow, a heavy police presence and document checks were reported at the makeshift memorial on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, where Nemtsov was gunned down on Feb. 27, 2015. Municipal workers were seen discarding flowers, portraits and wreaths left by EU, French, Italian, and German ambassadors.

“Gather everyone, have a chat and kick them out,” one police officer was overheard saying on the phone, according to the RusNews media outlet. Another officer told the outlet that people and flowers were being barred from the site due to an unspecified “special event.”

At around noon, a man was detained on the bridge for “violating public order,” RusNews reported. Officers at the police station allegedly struggled to determine which charges to press against him.

Two RusNews correspondents were briefly detained while live-streaming in Moscow, taken to a police station and later released. Another RusNews reporter was detained while on his way to cover a picket in honor of Nemtsov in the Siberian city of Barnaul and released several hours later.

In the city of Ufa, police detained three people attempting to honor Nemtsov at a memorial for victims of political repression. They were released with a warning, according to the civil rights organization OVD-Info.

Events commemorating Nemtsov also took place in the cities of Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and St. Petersburg. Police presence and the removal of flowers were reported in some of those locations.

Five men were convicted for Nemtsov’s murder, but his family and supporters maintain that the organizers behind the killing remain unpunished.