Moscow city hall denied permission to hold a march to commemorate journalists killed in Russia over the past years. The event was to take place next Sunday, the radio station Ekho Moskvy reports.

City officials said the action would disrupt car traffic and hinder access to certain locations in the city center for ordinary residents who will not participate in the procession, thus violating their constitutional rights.

The organizers of the march — a group of Moscow-based journalists — told Ekho the action was planned a civil action to pay tribute to journalists killed while doing their job or expressing their opinion.

The recent killing of Anna Politkovskaya in October encouraged them to hold the action, the organizers said. They planned to walk peacefully through central Moscow next Sunday, Ekho said.

Anna Politkovskaya, who reported for Novaya Gazeta on human rights abuses in Chechnya and criticized President Vladimir Putin for building an authoritarian political system, was shot dead in her block of flats in central Moscow on Oct. 7. She was the latest investigative reporter to be killed in Russia. These are some of the murders of other reporters in recent years:

July 9, 2004: Paul Klebnikov, the U.S.-born editor of the Russian edition of Forbes who had been investigating the murky business world in Russia, is gunned down as he leaves his Moscow office.

April 29, 2002: Valery Ivanov, editor of the newspaper Tolyatinskoye Oborzreniye in the southern city Russian city of Togliatti, is shot dead outside his home. The newspaper was well-known for its reports on local organized crime, drug trafficking and official corruption.

June 7, 1998: Larisa Yudina, editor of the opposition newspaper Sovetskaya Kalmykia in the southern Russian region of Kalmykia, is stabbed to death and her body dumped in a pond on the outskirts of the regional capital, Elista.

March 1, 1995: Vladislav Listyev, executive director of the newly formed public television station ORT, is shot dead as he enters his apartment block. Listyev was one of Russia’s best-known TV journalists.

October 17, 1994: Dmitry Kholodov, an investigative reporter for the Moscow newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, is killed in a bomb blast at the newspaper’s office. Kholodov, who had been investigating mafia connections with the military, was killed when he opened a briefcase he believed contained secret documents.

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