Moscow, 8 April: Representatives of Moscow branches of leading foreign non-governmental organizations have expressed protest at linking the work of foreign NGOs with helping terrorism.

"This is an unfair game," Aleksandr Petrov, councillor for Russia and the CIS of the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch, told journalists on Tuesday (8 April).

He commented on the statement made by head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Nikolay Patrushev that certain foreign NGOs provide support to foreign terrorist and extremist religious organizations in terms of information (helping them) to carry out recruitment on Russian territory.

"Any such references to foreign NGOs harm their reputation. All this reflects in an extremely negative light in people's consciousness. Let the FSB name something concrete," Petrov said. Head of Russian branch of the WWF Igor Chestin agreed with Petrov.

"Linking NGOs to terrorist organizations is absolutely irresponsible, there is no confirmation of that," he said to journalists on Tuesday.

"Two years ago an absolutely nonsensical law on NGOs was passed in Russia which has affected the NGOs. Several thousand organizations which could not deal with official red tape have been closed. And none of those organizations were closed because of their links to terrorism or because they were carrying out activities harmful to Russia," Chestin said. (Passage omitted: quotations from Patrushev's speech that have already been reported).