AKIPRESS.COM - Russian opposition politician, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead in Moscow in the evening of February 27, Russian officials say.
An unidentified attacker in a car shot Mr Nemtsov four times in the back as he crossed a bridge in view of the Kremlin, police say.
He died hours after appealing for support for a march on Sunday in Moscow against the war in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned the murder, Putin's spokesperson Dmitriy Peskov says.
President Putin has assumed personal control of the investigation into the killing, said Peskov.
Mr Nemtsov, 55, served as first deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s.
He had earned a reputation as an economic reformer while governor of one of Russia's biggest cities, Nizhny Novgorod.
Mr Nemtsov was shot at around 23:40 (20:40 GMT) on Friday while crossing Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge accompanied by a woman, Russia's interior ministry said.
He was shot with a pistol from a white car which fled the scene, a police source told Russia's TASS news agency.
According to Russian-language news website Meduza project, "several people" got out of a car and shot him.
One of the politician's colleagues in his RPR-Parnassus party, Ilya Yashin, said: "unfortunately I can see the corpse of Boris Nemtsov in front of me now."
Flowers were left at the site of the shooting through the night.
The police say the woman who was accompanying Nemtsov Friday night is under interrogation.