Mourners gather in Moscow for Nemtsov funeral

Latest update : 2015-03-03

Mourners gathered in Moscow on Tuesday for the funeral of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead in the country's capital last week.

Nemstov, 55, was a former deputy prime minister and a longtime critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. His funeral will be held in Moscow’s Troekurovskoye cemetery.

The service comes as senior officials from Poland and Latvia complained that they had been prohibited from entering Russia on the eve of the funeral.

Polish Senate speaker Bogdan Borusewicz was refused entry by Moscow in reprisal for EU sanctions against Russia's upper house of parliament speaker Valentina Matviyenko, the Polish foreign ministry said.

Latvian MEP Sandra Kalniete told the AFP news agency she had also been refused entry into Russia at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, but was not given a reasonable explanation for the ban.

"Since I have always taken a clear and explicit language on Russia's role in Ukraine, I had suspicions that it could happen," she said.

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Konrad Pawlik will attend the funeral, according to Polish media, while Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius will also be present, his spokesman said.

Nemtsov was gunned down shortly before midnight Friday while walking across a bridge just a short distance from the Kremlin with his Ukrainian girlfriend, 23-year-old model Ganna Duritska.

Putin, whose rule has seen the steady suppression of independent media, non-Kremlin controlled political parties and opposition-minded business figures, called the murder a "contract killing" and said it was a provocation.

Soon after the killing, Putin promised an all-out effort to catch the perpetrators.

Girlfriend returns to Ukraine

Duritska, the chief witness in the murder, returned to Ukraine’s capital Kiev late on Monday, her lawyer confirmed, as authorities vowed to solve what is one of the most shocking political assassination to take place during Putin's rule.

On Monday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pledged that the "heinous crime" would be "fully investigated".

A reward of three million rubles ($48,000) was offered for information on Nemtsov's death, a substantial amount in Moscow, where the average monthly salary is 60,000 rubles ($960).

Duritska said earlier Monday she had given all the information she could to investigators but that they were preventing her from leaving Russia, citing concerns for her security.

Ganna's mother Inna Duritska, who lives in Kiev, told AFP prior to Ganna's departure from Russia that she feared that her daughter's de facto house arrest meant investigators might be preparing to make her a pawn in the deepening Russia-Ukraine crisis.

Russia and Ukraine have been foes since the ouster last year of former president Viktor Yanukovich, and Russia's seizure of the Crimean Peninsula. Ukraine's current government has also been battling pro-Russian separatists in the county’s east since April.

Friends of Nemtsov said he had been working on a report containing what he described as proof of secret Russian military involvement in the bloody uprising by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

He had also spoken of his fear of being killed in Russia, where a string of other prominent opposition figures have been murdered since Putin came to power 15 years ago.

But there was no imminent sign of danger on Friday when he was fatally shot in the back, Duritska – who was uninjured in the apparently well-planned shooting – said earlier.

Speaking via a fuzzy Skype connection from a Moscow apartment, Duritska said she did not see where the assassin came from. But she did notice a light-coloured car quickly drive off, she said.

She said she was immediately taken in for questioning which lasted through the night.

'A sacrifice'

Shocked opposition figures in Russia and Western leaders have called for a full and transparent probe into the murder of Nemtsov, who served as Boris Yeltsin's first deputy prime minister in the 1990s.

On Sunday, tens of thousands of people joined a memorial march in Moscow, numbers not seen at an opposition-linked event since mass anti-Putin rallies in 2011 and 2012.

The Investigative Committee leading the probe has offered several possible motives, including that the country's opposition could itself have ordered the hit on Nemtsov as "a sacrifice".

The murder took place in one of the most heavily policed areas of Moscow. However, some Russian media reports suggested that low-level criminals, not professional hit men, may have carried out the killing.

"Participants in the investigation are only sure of one thing – that the killers were not professionals," said the Russian daily Kommersant.

The broadsheet said they used ammunition that was years old and possibly an unreliable home-made weapon.

The murderer – or murderers – fired four bullets into Nemtsov's back and several more were found at the scene.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)