Italian gay rights activist Yuri Guaiana was held in Moscow on Thursday as he tried to deliver a petition to the office of Russia's prosecutor general demanding a probe into the alleged torture and detention of gay people in the country's Chechnya region, activists said.
"Yuri is now at a police station," said Italian politician and leader of the Luca Coscioni Association for Freedom of Research, Marco Cappato.
Italy's charge d'affairs in Moscow met Guiana who was "well", tweeted Italy's junior foreign minister Benedetto Della Vedova.
LGBT activists Alexandra Aleksieva, Marina Dedales, Nikita Safronov and Valentina Dekhtiarenko were also detained with Guiana, according to the Open Russia non-government organisation.
Russian police said the activists were detained because their action was unauthorised.
The petition the activists were trying to deliver at the time of their arrest was signed "by more than two million people around the world," the Russian LBGT Network said.
It demanded an "unbiased investigation of the illegal detentions of hundreds of people in Chechnya because of their homosexuality," the group said.
Reports of a campaign against gay men by Chechen security forces began trickling through in early April when they appeared in Russian investigative weekly Novaya Gazeta and the LGBT Nework claimed there was "an organised campaign to detain gay men" in Chechnya.
Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of the overwhelmingly Muslim republic said last week he would cooperate with Russia's federal authorities on the issue but repeated recent assertions that gay people do not exist in Chechnya.
