MOSCOW — More than 500 activists rallied today in Moscow in memory of a human rights lawyer and a journalist slain a year ago, and more than 20 of them were detained by police.
The killing of lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova on Jan. 19, 2009, caused an international outcry. They were gunned down by a masked gunman on a busy central street after attending a daytime news conference.
Authorities in November arrested two alleged members of an extreme nationalist group suspected of involvement in the killing. Their trial is still pending.
Participants in today’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 some of them.
Police spokesman Viktor Biryukov said 24 demonstrators were detained for taking part in an unsanctioned march.
However, police allowed other participants in the protest to move along the boulevard and hold another rally a few hundred yards away.
Activist Sergei Udaltsov said the demonstrators wanted to draw attention to Russian authorities’ slow action against neo-Nazi and other extremist groups.
“We are here to say our firm “No” to nationalism, fascism and inactivity of authorities,” Udaltsov told The Associated Press at the rally.
Russia has seen a string of contract-style killings of human rights workers and journalists in recent years, including investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, whose contract-style killing in October 2006 shocked the world. Few of the killings are ever solved. In the rare case when suspects are brought to trial, the mastermind is rarely identified.
Markelov had angered radical nationalists, who had threatened him, but he also made enemies through his work of fighting for victims of rights abuses in Chechnya. Baburova, who had worked for Politkovskaya’s crusading Novaya Gazeta newspaper, died when she tried to stop the hit man.
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