Russian police detain nearly 700 at Moscow opposition rally
Russian police have detained nearly 700 people attending a protest in Moscow to demand free elections, including prominent activist Lyubov Sobol, after authorities warned the demonstration was illegal.
Police removed the opposition leader Lyubov Sobol from a taxi and bundled her into a van minutes before the start of what anti-Kremlin activists described as a peaceful walk to protest against the exclusion of their candidates from an election next month.
Soon after the start of the protest, a Reuters reporter saw several hundred people milling around at one of the designated protest points in central Moscow. Minutes later, a line of riot police began to squeeze people out of the area.
OVD-Info, an independent monitoring group, said police had detained 685 people, in some cases beating them with truncheons as they lay on the floor. Reuters reporters witnessed dozens of arrests. In one case, police carried off a man as he clung upside down to his bicycle.
Police said they had detained 600 and said 1,500 had attended the protest, though footage of demonstrations which flared in different parts of Moscow suggested many more had taken part.
The focus of protesters' anger is a prohibition on a number of opposition-minded candidates, some of whom are allies of jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny, from taking part in a September election for Moscow's city legislature.
That vote, though local, is seen as a dry run for a national parliamentary election in 2021.
Authorities say opposition candidates failed to collect enough genuine signatures to register. The excluded candidates say that is a lie and insist on taking part in a contest they believe they could win.
(Source: Reuters)
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