An elderly woman and her daughter have been found dead in the Volga city of Kazan under a “Free Pussy Riot” slogan written in what appears to be their blood, investigators in Russia's Republic of Tatarstan said on Thursday.

The victims are a 76-year-old woman and her 38-year-old daughter, who lived together.

“The murder is thought to have taken place between August 24 and 26, and the women died of numerous stab wounds,” the Investigation Committee said in a statement. “Free Pussy Riot” was written in English at the crime scene, on their apartment wall, presumably in blood.”

A lawyer for Pussy Riot, Nikolai Polozov, described the murder as a “heinous, dirty provocation.”

“I regret that those monsters used the Pussy Riot name for such purposes,” he said.

The report came some two weeks after a Moscow court handed down a two-year sentence to three members of the all-female anti-Putin punk band Pussy Riot, in a case which divided Russian society and sparked a wave of protest actions in support of the group.

The group members were jailed after a protest at Moscow’s largest cathedral over Orthodox Church support for Vladimir Putin ahead of the March presidential polls that returned the former KGB officer to the Kremlin for a third term.