A beautiful Ukrainian model may hold the key to identifying the
assassins who gunned down top Russian opposition politician Boris
Nemtsov.
Anna Duritskaya, 23,
was with the charismatic pro-Western reformer when he was killed in a
drive-by shooting in view of the Kremlin as they walked home from a
restaurant in Red Square on Friday evening.
Ms Duritskaya, who was not injured, was questioned by police for several hours and only released at 5am yesterday.
Last night, friends of the couple said they feared the Russian
authorities were trying to implicate Ms Duritskaya in what is believed
to be a politically motivated murder. One said: ‘She is the victim of
appalling innuendo as she grieves. It looks like a smear.’
Even as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Angela Merkel,
condemned the killing of one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal
critics, pro-Kremlin media organisations were hinting darkly that Ms
Duritskaya’s ‘role’ needed to be ‘clarified’.
One Putin-supporting online newspaper, Life News, reported that she had
recently had an abortion and suggested – with no evidence to back up the
claim – that the couple might have had a row.
It quoted a ‘high-ranking’ state investigator as saying: ‘The girl who
accompanied Boris Nemtsov at the moment of his murder is a citizen of
Ukraine.
‘We have found out that not long ago she flew from Moscow to Switzerland
to abort a baby fathered by the politician. We do not exclude…a
conflict in their private life.’
Mr Nemtsov, 55, died hours after appealing for support for a march today
in Moscow against the war in Ukraine. He had openly opposed Russia’s
role in the conflict and the annexation of Crimea.
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