Moscow, 17 April: An internal investigation should be carried out into incidents when the police exceeded their authority during the Dissenters' March held in Moscow and St Petersburg over the weekend, presidential aide Sergey Yastrzhembskiy has said.

"It would be right to conduct an internal investigation concerning those people who exceeded their authority. First and foremost, it refers to people who exceeded their authority towards journalists," Yastrzhembskiy said today, answering journalists' questions.

Dozens of participants in the Dissenters' March were detained for various violations in Moscow and St Petersburg.

"The organizers of these events exposed both themselves and people who took part in the march to the actions of law enforcers," Yastrzhembskiy said.

In his opinion, they did it to draw attention to themselves abroad. "I think that they did it, first and foremost, to be the front-page news of the European media," Yastrzhembskiy said.

He believes that the state did everything that was necessary, in particular it allocated venues for the marches to be held. "When the routes of marches are violated, things that happened in Moscow happen in any country in the world. In one form or another the same happened in Berlin, in Dresden during a march of the ultra right-wing forces, quite recently in Budapest, in Milan and in Paris suburbs," Yastrzhembskiy said.