Protesters detained in Russia

Russian nationalists shouting "death to homosexuals" punched and kicked demonstrators calling for the right to hold a Gay Pride parade in central Moscow yesterday while riot police detained about 31 protesters. Two MEPs were among those held as they tried to present a petition asking Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who has called gay marches satanic acts, to lift a ban on the parade.

Nationalists and extreme Russian Orthodox believers held icons and denounced homosexuality as "evil" while a group of thick-set young men turned up with surgeons' masks, which they said would protect them from the "gay disease". Hundreds of riot police lined Tverskaya Street in central Moscow and plain-clothes police mingled with a large number of foreign and Russian journalists.