Moscow - Two Russian rights activists said Thursday they were cautioned by investigators about speaking out after they visited suspects in the killing of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in prison.
Andrei Babushkin and Yeva Merkacheva said that inspectors from the Investigative Committee obliged them late on Wednesday to sign non-disclosure agreements, the Interfax news agency reported.
“I can no longer comment on the case, but I may speak about human rights issues,” Babushkin said, adding that the officers visited him at his workplace.
Merkacheva said that investigators showed up at her Moscow flat after nightfall. The reporter for the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said she signed the agreement even though it struck her as strange. “After all I have no knowledge of the case,” she said.
Babushkin and Merkacheva on Tuesday visited three Chechens in Moscow's Lefortovo prison in their capacity as members of a prisoners' rights monitoring watchdog set up with authorities' approval.
They said afterwards that two of the suspects had bruises that looked like signs of torture. The Investigative Committee, a powerful body that reports directly to President Vladimir Putin, then accused them breaking the law by researching a criminal case without being part of it.
Investigators have yet to press charges against Zaur Dadayev and the brothers Anzor and Shadit Gubashev, who all hail from the mainly Muslim region of Chechnya.
Dadayev's state-appointed lawyer, Ivan Gerasimov, said Wednesday that the former police lieutenant was cooperating with the investigation.
The lawyer refused to comment on reports that Dadayev has made a confession, Interfax reported.
Nemtsov, a fervent critic of Putin, was gunned down shortly before midnight on February 27. The fact that the shooting happened close to the Kremlin has prompted accusations that it was either sanctioned or ordered directly by Putin.
Authorities arrested five suspects in the case, all of whom come from the North Caucasus.
Investigators have suggested that Nemtsov might have been killed by radical Islamists because he had defended French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Opposition activists have rejected this version as unconvincing.
The European Parliament on Thursday called for an international investigation into Nemtsov's killing, calling it the “most significant political murder in recent Russian history.”
Nemtsov “committed his life to a more democratic, prosperous, open Russia,” the EU's parliament said in a resolution passed at its plenary session in Strasbourg.
It charged that Kremlin propaganda was turning Russia into a “state of repression, hate speech and fear,” and called on the government to steer clear of “all pressure, repressive acts and intimidation.”
Conservative EU parliamentarian Sandra Kalniete, who was barred from entering Russia for Nemtsov's funeral, spoke of a “dictatorship” in the country.
“We Europeans know from our experience that any dictatorship will destroy itself from within sooner or later,” she said in a debate before Thursday's vote.
Sapa-dpa