Thousands mourn murdered Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov

Slain Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was laid to rest in a Moscow cemetery on Tuesday after an emotional funeral ceremony where thousands of mourners bade him farewell.

One of Russian president Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics, Mr Nemtsov was shot dead on Friday night on a bridge near the Kremlin in a brazen murder that has sent shock waves across Russia and unleashed a wave of international condemnation.

Mr Nemtsov’s body was laid out an open coffin on Tuesday morning in the Sakharov Center, a human rights organisation named after the late Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, before being taken for burial at the Troyekurovskoy cemetery in Moscow.

Final respects

Thousands of mourners waited in the bitter cold to pay their final respects and lay flowers on the funeral bier.

“I am not saying goodbye because heroes never die,” Dmitry Gudkov, one of the few opposition deputies in the Russian parliament, said at the public funeral ceremony.

Few high-ranking Kremlin officials turned up.

Mr Putin, who earlier suggested Mr Nemtsov’s killing could have been a “provocation” to destabilise Russia, sent his little-known parliamentary representative, Garry Mink.

Arkady Dvorkovich, the Russian deputy prime minister and one of a group of increasingly marginalised liberals in the government, made a brief appearance early in the day.

Also in attendance was US ambassador to Russia John Tefft and a large delegation of European Union diplomats, including Irish Ambassador Eoin O’Leary.

Conspicuous by his absence was Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader who is serving a 15-day sentence for handing out leaflets at a Moscow metro station.

In a move that the European Parliament said would damage already strained relations, Bogdan Borusewicz, the speaker of the Polish senate, and Sandra Kalniete, a Latvian parliamentarian were prevented from entering the country to attend the funeral.

Yeltsin links

At the Sakharov Center, Mr Nemtsov’s open coffin lay in a small room with hanging photographs of his life. These started from the time he served in the liberal government of Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, through to the Putin years when he campaigned against the country’s slide into corruption and autocracy.

Speakers made personal tributes to Mr Nemtsov as a caring , humorous friend and freedom fighter whose brutal honesty may have cost him his life.

“He became an enemy because he spoke the truth and many people don’t want the truth,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, a former Russian prime minister who now leads the Parnas opposition party.

“They are ready for murder, for murder near the Kremlin walls in the centre of Moscow. Who could have imagined this four days ago?”

US and EU leaders have been pressing the Kremlin to conduct a rigorous investigation and find out who was behind Mr Nemtsov’s murder.

But four days after an assassin shot four bullets into the opposition leader’s back, Russian police have not arrested any suspects, or found the weapon or getaway car.

“If the person who ordered the crime is not found we will stop existing as a people, as a race and as individuals that respect each other,” said Yevgeniya Albats, editor-in-chief of the Russian political weekly the New Times.

‘Alarm bell’

Whoever the culprit, the killing of Mr Nemtsov was an “alarm bell” warning of of dangerous “radical forces” threatening Russian security”, said Andrei Buzin, the chairman of Golos - a Russian election watchdog that has come under pressure from the Kremlin since reporting alleged vote-rigging at a parliamentary poll in 2011. “It’s going to be very difficult for Putin,” he added.

So many people came to pay their respects to Mr Nemtsov that when the hearse came to bear the coffin away to the cemetery, there was still a long queue winding up the hill beside the Sakharov Center.

One mourner, Tatyana, a retired theatre director, said she had come more as an “act of protest” than to see the late politician’s remains.

“The Russian leadership sows hatred as if there were enemies all around...It’s the aggression that leads to such murders.”