MOSCOW -- Russian opposition leaders on Saturday accused the Kremlin of being behind the death of a figure of post-Soviet politics, Boris Nemtsov, as they struggled to come to grips with the highest-profile assassination of President Vladimir Putin's 15 years in power.
Russian authorities, meanwhile, said Saturday that they were investigating several theories about the crime, some immediately scorned as improbable, including the possibility that fellow members of the opposition had killed Nemtsov to create a martyr.
Nemtsov, 55, was gunned down late Friday, underneath the swirling domes of St. Basil's Cathedral and steps from the Kremlin -- the heart of power in Russia and one of the most secure areas in the nation.
The killing came just hours after a radio interview in which he called on Moscow residents to join an opposition rally today to protest Putin's handling of the economic crisis and his "mad, aggressive and deadly policy of war against Ukraine."
No suspects have been taken into custody in the drive-by shooting.
Initially, Russian news media reported Nemtsov had been shot from a passing car. On Saturday, however, a television channel, TVTs, broadcast a surveillance video purporting to show the killing, though from a distance. Nemtsov had left a cafe in the GUM shopping center on Red Square and was walking with his girlfriend, Anna Duritskaya, a Ukrainian model.
A snowplow blocks the scene. But the video, which has not been independently verified, appears to show the shooter hiding on a stairway on Moskvoretsky Bridge over the Moscow River waiting for Nemtsov and Duritskaya to pass. Later, the figure of the supposed shooter runs to a getaway car that pulls up on the bridge.
On Saturday afternoon, state-run news outlets reported that investigators had found a white Lada sedan that they believed was used in the killing. Broadcast images showed a car with license plates from Ingushetia, a tumultuous Muslim-majority province in the Caucasus that has long been plagued with extremist violence.
Hours after the assassination, investigators were at Nemtsov's Moscow apartment, searching his files, confiscating his computer hard drive and questioning his neighbors, the Interfax news service reported.
A Kremlin spokesman said there were no grounds to fear that other opposition leaders would be killed.
"The murder is monstrous, and, as the president said, it has all the markings of a contract killing," Dmitry Peskov told the opposition-leaning Dozhd television channel. "But to judge on that basis that this is the beginning of a series of such killings is overly emotional, and it's wrong."
Still, opposition leaders said they had canceled today's rally that they had hoped would breathe new life into a movement that has struggled under the weight of a wave of nationalism that followed the annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula a year ago. Nemtsov had been one of the lead organizers. Instead, his allies said they planned to have a memorial march for him today in central Moscow.
It was unclear whether the slaying would spur new support for the opposition movement or whether it would simply be further marginalized, repressed by fear and the silencing of one of its most prominent voices.
"It's not decided, but it could go both directions. Toward more cruelty or actually some change in the regime, as well, if we figure out how to use this momentum," said Leonid Volkov, an opposition leader who had been organizing the rally with Nemtsov.
"Of course the personal perception of safety has just been enormously shattered. No one considered that someone could be just shot down. The regime was used to imprisoning people," Volkov said.
"It's a new era in Russian opposition politics."
many theories
Russia's leading investigative agency said in a statement -- the fullest official response to Nemtsov's killing so far -- it was looking into several possible motives for the killing.
The first possibility, the Investigative Committee said, was that the murder was aimed at destabilizing the political situation in the country and Nemtsov was a "sacrificial victim for those who do not shun any method for achieving their political goals."
This suggestion echoed comments by Putin's spokesman and other Russian politicians that the attack was a "provocation to destabilize the political situation in the country," said the committee's spokesman, Vladimir Markin, in a statement.
The term "sacrificial victim" was also the same one Putin used three years ago when he warned that his political opponents were planning to kill one of their own and then blame it on his government.
The Investigative Committee also cited the possibility that Islamic extremists had killed Nemtsov over his position on the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, saying that security forces had been aware of threats against him from Islamist militants.
The committee also said "radical personalities" on one or another side of the Ukrainian conflict might have been responsible. The statement said the police were also considering possible business or personal disputes as motives.
Authorities discounted any Kremlin link, Markin said.
The investigators said they also were considering whether there was "personal enmity" toward Nemtsov in his domestic life.
State-controlled and Kremlin-friendly TV gave considerable attention to Nemtsov's companion, Duritskaya. The Investigative Committee said the pair was headed for Nemtsov's apartment.
Life News, a television station with close ties to the Russian security services, quoted a source as suggesting that Nemtsov was murdered in revenge for having caused a woman to have an abortion.
Law enforcement critics say having so many theories can serve as a smoke screen in high-profile cases, but it also reflects a Soviet-era policy for managing the security services, under which investigators are credited with making progress when a version of events is ruled out -- giving the police an incentive to begin with a wide array of improbable guesses.
At the Moscow crime scene on a dreary Saturday, hundreds of people -- including ambassadors from the U.S. and several European countries -- gathered to lay red roses and white carnations. Many were in tears.
After laying flowers on the mound, and kneeling in respect, Anatoly Chubais, a co-founder with Nemtsov of the Union of Right Forces political party, scorned the investigators' abundance of theories.
"Today, we had a statement that the liberal opposition organized the killing," he said. "Before this, they wrote that the liberals created the economic crisis. In this country, we have created demand for anger and hate."
Members of the opposition generally agreed that the killing was politically motivated. There were differing opinions as to whether it was actually tied to the Kremlin or whether it was simply the product of a new climate of aggression that Putin has unleashed in the year since the annexation of Crimea.
"There is only one conclusion," opposition leader and Nemtsov ally Vladimir Milov wrote on his blog. "The murder of Boris Nemtsov is connected to the authorities." He said the timing of the killing as well as its location in the high-security heart of Moscow gave him little doubt.
Other Kremlin critics have been killed over the years, including journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, and lawyer Sergey Magnitsky in 2008. But few people have been brought to justice for the deaths.
Putin condolences
Putin and other allies have said the assassination was a provocation intended to discredit the Kremlin.
But the president's own rhetoric Saturday was mostly conciliatory, as he sent a condolence telegram to Nemtsov's mother.
"Boris Nemtsov left his mark on the history of Russia in politics and public life," Putin said. "Everything will be done so that the organizers and perpetrators of this vile and cynical murder are punished."
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev echoed the suggestion that the killing was a provocation. "It's an attempt to push the situation into complications, maybe even to destabilizing the situation in the country," he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
President Barack Obama said the Russian people have "lost one of the most dedicated and eloquent defenders of their rights." German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised Nemtsov's courage in criticizing Kremlin policies, and urged Putin to ensure that the killers are brought to justice, her spokesman Steffen Seibert said.
Also Saturday, Alexei Navalny, the leader of a younger generation of Kremlin critics who is currently serving a 15-day prison sentence for distributing fliers, said, "I am so deeply shocked that I cannot even find words.
"Boris came here a couple of days ago, he was so lively and energetic, full of plans," Navalny wrote on his Facebook page, through an associate. "He immediately charmed the policemen, chatted with them cheerfully, explained to them why it is good for them to support the demands of the spring march, gave them brochures with his report."
Nemtsov allies said he had been preparing to release a report detailing evidence that Russian soldiers were fighting in Ukraine alongside pro-Russia rebels, an accusation the Kremlin repeatedly has denied.
In a previous report on corruption released before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Nemtsov alleged that Russian officials and businessmen had stolen up to $30 billion during the preparations for the games. He also has exposed alleged corruption in state gas company Gazprom.
"This is a monstrous tragedy and a loss for us all," Navalny's Facebook post said.
Yevgenia Albats, the editor of the New Times magazine, said Nemtsov knew his work was dangerous but tried to convince her that, as a former high official in the Kremlin, he enjoyed immunity.
"He was afraid of being killed," Albats said. "And he was trying to convince himself, and me, they wouldn't touch him because he was a member of the Russian government, a vice premier, and they wouldn't want to create a precedent. Because, as he said, one time the power will change hands in Russia again, and those who served Putin wouldn't want to create this precedent."
Information for this article was contributed by Michael Birnbaum of The Washington Post; by Lynn Berry, Jim Heintz, Vladimir Isachenkov and Laura Mills of The Associated Press; and by Andrew E. Kramer and Alexandra Odynova of The New York Times.
A Section on 03/01/2015