The governor of the Krasnodar region apologised for the actions of the Cossacks, who are being used as informal security at the Olympics, but the presence of many plainclothes security officers suggested their actions were sanctioned.
Kerr also claims that "two plainclothes policemen" visited him in 1981 just before the trial of Joseph Mains, Raymond Semple and William McGrath – the three senior Kincora care staff who were later jailed for abusing 11 boys.
A small crowd also lights candles in front of a poster for Kimani "Kiki" Gray, whom plainclothes officers killed on 9 March 2013 after he pointed a loaded.38 at them, they say.
On Thursday, the women were again followed by more than a dozen plainclothes officers, filming and keeping watch, as well as a group of young people who attempted to disrupt the women's press conference.
Related: Jimmy Thoronka: concerns raised over Sierra Leone athlete's welfare after arrest Thoronka, who has spent the winter living rough in London, said two plainclothes police officers arrested him as he was hurrying to a park where he had left a bag.
Just hours after the Guardian story appeared Thoronka was arrested in south London by plainclothes police officers when he was running back to a park to retrieve his bag.
His wife, Olga, told reporters: "We were in a hospital room when plainclothes men burst in, wrapped him up in a blanket and dragged out of the room in an unknown direction".
Through a chink in the wall of heavily armed, plainclothes police who chaperone him round the clock, the cartoonist Riss sighs and says that mentally, he is doing "OK".
Similarly, an all-too-common incident of police brutality in June, when plainclothes agents beat a 28-year-old Alexandrian to death outside an internet café, would probably have been shrugged off in the past; but this time images of the battered youth spread virally like those of Neda Soltan, the protester shot in a Tehran street who became the martyred icon of Iran's Green movement.
But then, according to several international NGO workers present, during the forum plainclothes agents could be seen copying notes, filming the forum's local participants and creating an intimidating atmosphere.
FLANKED by plainclothes policemen, a former top Chinese official, now a leading dissident, greets a foreign journalist outside his apartment building.
