A court on Thursday convicted five men of murdering Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, over two years after he was shot dead near the Kremlin.

Nemtsov, one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, was murdered in 2015 as he walked across a bridge in the heart of Moscow after dining with his girlfriend.

Aged 55, he had been working on a report examining Russia’s role in Ukraine.

His killing sent a chill through opposition circles.

After more than eight months of hearings, a jury trial convicted five men of his murder, including the man who the prosecutors said that pulled the trigger, Zaur Dadayev, a former soldier in Chechnya.

The court said that the four others had acted as his accomplices and that the group had been promised a bounty of 253,889 dollars for the high-profile assassination.

(Source: Reuters/NAN)