Memorial to Boris Nemtsov in Moscow was removed before the May holidays
The memorial display on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge dedicated to the memory of murdered politician Boris Nemtsov was disassembled again, presumably in preparation for the May holidays. Two activists on the bridge were detained.
"Holidays began. The memorial on Nemtsov Bridge was cleaned up. The next few weeks will be difficult. What’s a without traffic getting blocked? Most likely the government will clean up often. But holidays pass, and memory remains. Let them destroy [the memorial]. We will reconstruct it," Nadezhda Mityushkina, the co-chairman of the Moscow office of the Solidarity movement, wrote on Facebook.
According to OVD-Info, the police detained two men on watch duty near the memorial in the morning. Pavel Kolesnikov and Pavel Takmakov were brought to the Kitay-gorod Department of Internal Affairs where they are still being held without charges.
Andrey Margulev, an activist who witnessed men destroying the memorial, said that this time police officers justified detention of the men on duty by claiming they received a phone complaint about drunks on the bridge. According to Margulev, the detainees were checked in the police department for alcohol intoxication. Margulev went to the police to make a formal complaint about the unknown workers’ “hooligan” actions.
Boris Nemtsov was the co-chairman of the RPR-Parnas party and the deputy of the Yaroslavl regional duma. He was shot in the center of Moscow late at night on February 27, 2015. Authorities arrested an ex-member of the Sever battalion of Internal Troops of the Ministry for Internal Affairs of Chechnya, a man named Zaur Dadayev, whom investigators believe to be the perpetrator of the murder. Khamzat Bakhayev, Anzor and Shadid Gubashev and Tamerlan Eskerkhanov were also arrested for conspiracy to murder.