Thousands of people attended a memorial service for the politician in Moscow last week and world leaders have urged Russia to track down the killers.
Miss Duritskaya did not see the murderer but saw a getaway car driving away from the scene.
Ilya Yashin, an opposition activist and friend of Mr Nemtsov, said of the detained men that it was “difficult to say whether these were the real executors [of the murder] or the investigation has been sent down the wrong track”, but he acknowledged that the security service apparently had some evidence to prove their guilt.
“It’s extremely important that the case doesn’t just stop with the shooters, whether they are the real killers or not,” he added. “The key task is to find and detain those who ordered it.”
A source close to the investigation told Interfax the two suspects were tracked down using telephone records, video from surveillance cameras and forensic evidence collected from a car they had used.
The source confirmed that the person or people responsible for ordering the assassination were still at large.
The two suspects’ names would suggest possible roots in the North Caucasus region of southern Russia, where there is an active Islamist insurgency in republics such as Chechnya and Dagestan. One theory put forward by investigators last week was that Mr Nemtsov was killed by Islamist fundamentalists in revenge for his criticism of the murder of journalists at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. However, if the suspects were hired hitmen, then their place of origin could be irrelevant.
Vladimir Milov, another opposition activist who is a former deputy energy minister, expressed a widely-held belief that people from the North Caucasus are often used by Russian authorities as scapegoats for crimes.
“Two Chechens have been appointed the guilty ones,” he said in a Facebook post. “It’s so predictable that there’s nothing to comment on.”
Russia’s Investigative Committee has suggested several other potential motives for the killing, including that it was a “provocation” designed to discredit the government, but pointedly did not mention his opposition activities.
Mr Nemtsov’s friends believe the most obvious reason for the killing was the politician's denigrations of Mr Putin and other officials for being allegedly corrupt and repressive, and his criticism of Moscow’s military support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.
His daughter and some of his associates say they do not trust the official investigation.
They also blame the Kremlin for creating a "climate of hate" around opposition figures, who are described as traitors and "fifth columnists" for the West in state media.
Speaking to senior police officers last week, Mr Putin said that “the most serious attention” must be dedicated to solving high-profile crimes, “including those with a political motive”. “Russia must at last be rid of the shame and tragedy such as that which we lived through and saw not long ago,” the president said in a speech. “I mean, the audacious murder of Boris Nemtsov right in the centre of the capital.”
Earlier, Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s spokesman, had said the president “noted that this cruel killing has all the signs of a hit, and is a pure provocation”.
The two suspects could be formally arrested on Sunday.
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