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Nemtsov funeral: Crowds gather to pay tribute

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Nemtsov funeral: Crowds gather to pay tribute

Mourners in Moscow have paid their respects to the Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.

Nemtsov’s body was laid out in a coffin in the Sakharov Centre – named after the late Soviet-era dissident and Nobel peace prize laureate, Andrei Sakharov – before being taken for burial at the Troyekurovskoy cemetery.

Senior officials from Poland and Latvia who sought to attend the funeral said they had been denied entry to Russia. The Polish foreign ministry said its 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 Guardian reports.

The Latvian MEP Sandra Kalniete told Agence France-Presse she had been refused entry 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.

The queue of those waiting to pay their respects on an icy Moscow morning stretched for hundreds of metres along the road. Inside the room, they were ushered past the open coffin as close friends and relatives stood vigil, including Nemtsov’s mother, who turned 88 on Tuesday.

“It was an attack on Boris Nemtsov, an attack on all of us, on Russian society, on the possibility for people to hold their own opinions,” fellow opposition politician Gennady Gudkov said at the ceremony.

REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

The opposition leader Alexei Navalny had asked Russian authorities to release him from a 15-day jail sentence to attend the burial, but he was refused permission.

No high-ranking Russian politicians attended the ceremony. Putin was represented by Garry Minkh, his representative in the Russian parliament, who passed on the president’s condolences.

Many of the speeches focused on Nemtsov’s personal qualities but some could not avoid politics. Ilya Yashin, Nemtsov’s long-time political colleague, said: “Putin has at least indirect responsibility for this”.

Also in attendance were the US ambassador, John Tefft, the former British prime minister John Major, and the former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who has gone into opposition.

No suspects have been arrested in the death of Nemtsov, who was shot while walking with his girlfriend across a bridge near the Kremlin.

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