By Nikolaus von Twickel/Moscow/DPA


What exactly happened late Friday on a bridge a stone’s throw from the Kremlin’s outer wall remained murky yesterday despite the fact that the key witness, Boris Nemtsov’s girlfriend Anna Duritskaya, made her first public comments about his killing.
The 23-year-old Ukrainian model, who was walking home with the Russian opposition leader after having dinner in a Red Square restaurant, said that she did not see where the killer came from.
“I did not see him because it happened behind my back,” she said on Moscow’s Dozhd television channel.
She said the gunman presumably fled in a light-coloured car but that she did not see him getting into it.
Police could also not say anything about suspects three days after the shooting of the prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin. Questions arose about how they were conducting the investigation, and fears abounded that, like other crimes against opposition figures, this one would go unsolved.
Investigators have said that the four bullets that hit Nemtsov in the chest were shot from a car driving by. But their theory was challenged by footage from a video surveillance camera that was aired by Moscow’s state-run TV Tsentr television station on Sunday.
The film, shot from a great distance, suggests the killing happened while a slow-moving lorry, believed to be either a snowplough or a street-cleaning vehicle, drives past two pedestrians, believed to be Nemtsov and Duritskaya.
After the vehicle passes the pedestrians, only one silhouette remains while a person runs away from the lorry and gets into a car that had stopped in the middle of the road and then speeds away.
The footage has prompted theories that the killer hopped onto the lorry like a dustman on a waste collection vehicle and approached the victim, protected by its massive and noisy silhouette.
The footage also shows that later, several cars and pedestrians stopped at the crime scene and left again.
According to Duritskaya, it took 10 minutes for police to arrive at the scene.
Many observers are questioning why it took law enforcement so long to notice a serious crime on such a highly sensitive location, thought to be under around-the-clock surveillance, including by Russia’s Federal Guards Service, the agency responsible for protecting Putin.
An online video that went viral yesterday showed an incident in August in which police arrived within seconds and prevented opposition activists from unfolding a Ukrainian flag from the same bridge.
Vladimir Milov, an opposition leader and former deputy energy minister, said yesterday that law enforcement’s failure to act left little doubt that the killing was directly ordered by the Kremlin.
“Nemtsov’s murder was not an act by daring killers but a planned special operation with a lot of manpower and cover,” he charged in a blog post.
Milov pointed out that investigators missed a “unique chance” to nab the killers by blocking the one-way Ordynka street, on which the gunmen fled, and nearby Metro stations.
He also pointed out that the attackers must have been listening to Nemtsov’s private conversations to know the exact route he walked home that evening. He also said that it would be hard to let a getaway car, save a massive truck, stand waiting below the bridge, where armies of Federal Guardsmen and traffic police officers enforce a blanket parking ban day and night.
Other commentators have argued that Putin had nothing to fear from Nemtsov, who had clearly passed his political peak and for the past two years was serving as a minor opposition lawmaker in a region north of Moscow.
For this reason, many posters at a rally on Sunday in Moscow mourning his death read, “Propaganda Kills”, suggesting that the killing was a hate crime for which the Russian state media’s campaign against the opposition is to blame.