Two alleged Russian ultra-nationalists went on trial on Tuesday for the killing of a human rights lawyer and a journalist, who were gunned down in broad daylight not far from the Kremlin.
The murders of Lawyer Stanislav Markelov and opposition reporter Anastasia Baburova in January 2009 fuelled criticism that the authorities fail to do enough to hunt down those who target rights activists and journalists.
"The two accused belonged to an ultra-nationalist group. Ethnic hatred was the motive for the crime," Vladimir Zherebyonkov, lawyer for Baburova’s family, told Reuters by telephone.
Although both victims were Russians, Markelov had represented the mother of an anti-fascist campaigner who he said was killed by neo-Nazis.
He had also contested the early release of a former Russian tank commander imprisoned for the murder of a Chechen girl. Baburova, from the Novaya Gazeta paper, had been walking with him when the pair were killed with an automatic pistol.
A man and a woman, Nikita Tikhonov and Yevgeniya Khasis, went on trial in a Moscow court on Tuesday charged with their murders. Tikhonov has confessed to involvement. It was not clear if Khasis had yet entered a plea.
Their lawyers could not be reached for comment.
Neo-nationalist movements have been gaining ground and boosting their membership numbers in Russia over the past year, shocking authorities and ordinary Russians.
Racial violence exploded in Moscow in December when some 7,000 soccer fans and nationalists chanting racist slogans demonstrated near Red Square and attacked passers-by who appeared to be non-Slavic.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned the unrest, the worst racial violence in Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union 20 years ago, calling it "xenophobia".
Early last year a Russian judge who sentenced neo-nationalists for hate crimes, Eduard Chuvashov, was shot dead in the stairwell of his apartment as he left for work. His attackers remain at large.
Attacks on investigative journalists have made Russia one of the most dangerous places in the world for reporters to work.
The 2006 high-profile slaying of reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who also worked at Novaya Gazeta, and of rights worker Natalia Estemirova are still unsolved.
The New York-based Committee (CPJ) ranks Russia eighth on its "Impunity Index", a listing of countries where journalists are killed regularly and governments fail to solve the crimes, placing it after Afghanistan and Nepal.
