At least 110 people have been detained in different Russian cities during actions to protest the death in prison of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, according to OVD-Info, an organization that protects the rights of detained opponents.
More than half of the arrests (69) were carried out in Saint Petersburg, the hometown of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The rest were arrested in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnodar and other cities in the European part of Russia and Siberia, OVD-Info states on its website.
In addition, the Police collected the personal data of all participants in these events, including the journalists who came to cover them.
Since Friday, law enforcement forces and plainclothes agents have been trying to remove all memorials created by Navalny’s supporters, both in monuments to the victims of political repression and in improvised places.
This happened, according to local Telegram channels, in front of the Kremlin on the bridge where opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered in 2015.
According to the local press, numerous people have paid tribute to the opposition leader since the day before by placing flowers or placing candles in designated places in their cities.
Thousands of Russians in exile took to the streets to protest what they consider a murder commissioned by the Kremlin and called for more actions in European, American and Latin American cities on Saturday.
Navalny, 47, died suddenly on Friday in the Arctic prison where he had been since last December, according to the Russian prison services.
The opposition and the independent Russian press, and the Western foreign ministries in unison accused Putin of ordering the assassination of Navalny, the Kremlin’s number one enemy for 15 years.
Navalny, who was serving a sentence of almost 30 years in prison, was transferred to an Arctic prison in December after announcing a campaign against Putin’s re-election in the March presidential elections.
Presidential spokesman Dmitri Peskov considered “unacceptable” the accusations made by the West before the results of the autopsy are known.
