KIEV, Ukraine -- The Ukrainian girlfriend of slain Kremlin critic and Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has been assigned security detail after receiving death threats, Ukrainian prosecutors said Friday.
Anna Duritskaya, the 23-year old model who was at Nemtsov's side when he was shot dead, "filed a statement about the threat to her life from unidentified people during her time in her parents' home," said Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
Duritskaya has hidden away from media and the public in her hometown of Bila Tserkva, 55 miles south of Kiev, since returning from Moscow on Monday.
"All necessary measures are taken to protect the life and health" of Duritskaya, Shokin said.
The prosecutor's statement gave no indication about who might have threatened Duritskaya.
The security detail will include several police special forces officers to ensure her safety, a spokesman at the prosecutor's office told AFP.
Duritskaya left Moscow on Monday after complaining to independent Russian Internet channel Dozhd TV of being interrogated by police without a lawyer all night following Nemtsov's murder. She told Dozhd that police had barred her from leaving the country, and that she doesn't know anything about the killing.
Nemtsov, a staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was gunned down in central Moscow nearly a stone's throw from the Kremlin just before midnight last Friday. The brazen killing is the most high profile of an opposition figure in Russia in recent years.
Thousands of Russians marched through Moscow to the scene of his murder on Sunday to mourn him.
On Tuesday, they said their final farewell to the fallen democratic crusader as he was laid to rest.
There are several competing theories as to who killed Nemtsov and why, but little tangible evidence to go on. Russian investigators have fingered Ukrainian security services and Islamist extremists as possible suspects.
Accusations from opposition figures and the West range from Russian nationalist groups influenced what what they say is toxic propaganda pumped out by state-run media to foment hate and cast the opposition as "traitors," to Putin himself.
One working motive put forth by Russia's opposition is that Nemtsov was killed because of a report he was working on about the Kremlin's involvement in the Ukraine conflict.
Kiev and the West say there is a preponderance of evidence to prove Moscow is backing the separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where 11 months of war has killed more than 6,000 people. Russia has repeatedly denied the allegations.
"Some paratroopers from Ivanovo have got in touch with me. Seventeen killed, they didn't give them their money, but for now they are frightened to talk," read a note among Nemtsov's possessions found by his opposition colleague Ilya Yashin.
Ищем материалы, которые Немцов готовил для доклада "Путин и война". Удалось собрать некоторые записи его почерком. pic.twitter.com/tXR7YCgEOv— Илья Яшин (@IlyaYashin) March 4, 2015
The note may have been the last thing he ever wrote, and part of the reason for killing him, friends and colleagues say.
Putin this week condemned Nemtsov's murder as a "disgrace" and called on authorities to put and end to political killings in Russia.
"The most serious attention should be paid to high-profile crimes, including those with political motives," Putin told top officials in Moscow on Wednesday. "We need to finally rid Russia of disgraces and tragedies like the one that we have recently endured and seen, I mean the murder, the provocative murder, of Boris Nemtsov right in the centre of the capital."