Alexei Kozhin, 19, is reportedly in serious condition after he was beaten by senior lieutenant of the FSB Dmitri Streltsov during an interrogation that followed his detention, Kazakov said in a statement.

He quoted the party's deputy chairman, Alexei Navalny, as saying that the party would complain to the prosecutor's office about the beatings.

At least nine people were detained Tuesday after a demonstration by the liberal Yabloko party's youth organization in front of the FSB building in central Moscow turned violent, a correspondent at the scene of the incident told MosNews.

Yabloko has said that special police forces were used to round up the activists, but a MosNews correspondent said she saw passersby holding some of the activists on the orders of policemen patrolling the area. Traffic police and private security guards also helped detain the activists. She said she saw one young man being beaten by at least four policemen.

About 20 young party representatives had marched up to the FSB building on Lubyanka Square around noon on Tuesday and began throwing red paint balls and eggs at the building and at the memorial plaque to former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, Kazakov told MosNews.

Apart from party activists, the nine people detained included journalists from NTV television, the independent Ekho Moskvy radio station, and the independent Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, Kazakov told MosNews.

The activists held up banners reading "Down with Big Brother!" and "Down with a Police State," as well as other slogans criticizing the regime of President Vladimir Putin, Kazakov said in a statement.

The young Yabloko activists, in a statement to MosNews, compared Putin's regime to that of other Russian dictators like Josef Stalin and Tsar Nicholas I

See also:

Human Rights

MosNews, July 27, 2004