More than 270 detained at Navalny memorials in Russia: Rights group

Police in Russia have detained more than 270 people across the country at memorials and rallies to honour opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who the authorities say died in a remote penal colony.

On Saturday, the OVD-Info protest monitoring group said 273 people had been detained, including at least 109 in Saint Petersburg and 39 in Moscow, at events on Friday and Saturday.

The federal prison service said that Navalny, 47, fell unconscious and died on Friday after a walk at the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence, prompting an outpouring of grief and shock among his supporters across the world and condemnation from world leaders.

As news of his death spread, spontaneous memorials took place in several urban areas, with people taken into custody in 32 cities, according to OVD-Info, which tracks political repression in Russia.

The group reported individual arrests in smaller cities across Russia, from the border city of Belgorod to Vorkuta, an Arctic mining outpost once a centre of the Stalin-era gulag labour camps, to Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Tver.

“In each police department there may be more detainees than in the published lists,” OVD-Info said. “We publish only the names of those people about whom we have reliable knowledge and whose names we can publish.” The tally could not be immediately verified.

The hundreds of flowers and candles laid in Moscow on Friday for Navalny, a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, were mostly taken away overnight in black bags. A few dozen roses and carnations remained in the snow on Saturday at the monument to the victims of Soviet repression, which sits in the shadow of the former KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square in central Moscow.

Videos and photos shared on Russian social media also showed flowers being cleared from monuments to victims of Soviet-era repression across the country.

Protests are illegal in Russia under strict anti-dissent laws, and the authorities have clamped down particularly harshly on rallies in support of Navalny.

Authorities in the capital said on Friday they were aware of calls online “to take part in a mass rally in the centre of Moscow” and warned people against attending.