LONDON (Reuters) - A Russian judge ordered the trial of three lawyers for the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny closed to journalists and the public on Thursday, citing the potential for provocations from Navalny's allies abroad, an independent news site reported.
Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser were detained last October and charged with belonging to an "extremist" group, which can carry up to six years in prison. The trio have been held in pre-trial detention since, and in November were added to Russia's list of "terrorists and extremists".
Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony in February under mysterious circumstances, was himself convicted under extremism and other charges, and his political movement, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), banned.
The state prosecutor in the trial, which opened on Thursday at a district court just east of Moscow, petitioned Judge Yulia Shilova to close the proceedings, citing a letter from Russia's Centre for Combating Extremism, known as Centre E.
According to independent news site Mediazona, the letter says that employees of Navalny's based outside Russia may be engaging in actions to influence witnesses and other aspects of the trial. All of Navalny's top allies live outside Russia.
A spokeswoman for Navalny did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment.
Russian authorities have cast Navalny and his supporters as Western-backed extremists seeking to destabilise Russia. His allies and wife Yulia Navalnaya, who has taken up her husband's mantle following his death, say they are fighting for a free, democratic Russia without President Vladimir Putin.
Defence attorneys for Navalny's lawyers pushed back against the judge's decision on Thursday, saying to close the trial would violate basic tenets of legal transparency.
"Publicity is one of the inviolable judicial principles," Mediazona cited Andrei Grivtsov, the lawyer for Kobzev, as saying.
Grivtsov added that the case materials were previously made public at preliminary hearings, and "there were no security violations" recorded.
Trials for serious crimes, such as treason, are often held behind closed doors in Russia, where acquittal rates are near zero.
In June a judge presiding at a trial for two leading Russian theatre figures barred journalists and observers from the court, citing unspecified alleged threats to some of the participants.
The director and playwright were later given six years in prison for "justifying terrorism" in a ruling condemned by independent observers as politicised.
(Reporting and writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by William Maclean)