Police in Russia have arrested more than 40 people, including three global gay rights leaders, after violence broke out at an unauthorised rally of gay rights activists in the capital, Moscow.

The fighting started when participants of the march were attacked as they were trying to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin.

Some of the attackers said they were members of the Russian-Orthodox church.

Russian gay rights activists were joined by campaigners from America and Europe in what has become an annual event.

Each year the authorities have refused the organisers permission and each year there have been arrests and violence.

Some gay rights activists were carrying banners reading "Russia is not Iran", others were waiving rainbow flags.

British gay rights activist, Peter Tatchell, says the mayor is behaving like a Nazi.

"This ban on Moscow gay pride is particularly shocking because during the Second World War, Muscovites stood against the Nazis who sought to exterminate Jews, homosexuals and communists," he said.

"But now the mayor of Moscow is colluding with neo-Nazis."

Britain's veteran gay rights leader Peter Tatchell says he saw three police buses parked outside the Moscow mayor's office "which were packed with people who looked like skinheads and neo-Nazis".

"Our suspicion is that they were police officers in civilian clothes. We suspect that a sizeable portion of the neo-Nazis were actually undercover police officers," he said.

One anti-gay campaigner said God had burned down Sodom and Gomorrah and would burn down Moscow too if gay rights marches were allowed.

Moscow - whose former mayor Yury Luzhkov once likened gays to the devil - has banned gay pride parades for six years running citing public discomfort with behaviour that was considered illegal in Soviet times.

Some 120 Russian activists were arrested during their first attempt to stage a Moscow parade in 2006 and the city warned in advance that those who showed up at the Kremlin would get no leniency on this occasion.

- BBC/AFP