Police in Russia have detained more than 100 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 more than 110 people had been arrested, including 64 in Saint Petersburg.
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 13 cities, according to OVD-Info, which tracks political repression in Russia.
Eleven people were detained in the capital, Moscow, and several others in the cities of Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Tver, it added.
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.
On a bridge beside the Kremlin where opposition leader and former prime minister Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on February 27, 2015, flowers were also removed overnight.
