MOSCOW, Sept 26: A Russian court ordered on Thursday eight Greenpeace activists, most of them foreigners, to be detained for two months over a protest on an Arctic oil platform, defying calls from the Netherlands for their immediate release.

The Lenin district court in the northern city of Murmansk was expected to rule on whether to detain a total of 30 activists from the Dutch-flagged Greenpeace protest ship Arctic Sunrise who are being held on suspicion of committing piracy.

The court ruled that Polish activist Tomasz Dziemianczuk as well as David John Haussmann and Jon Beauchamp from New Zealand, Paul Ruzycki from Canada and Francesco Pisanu from France should be detained until November 24, Greenpeace wrote on Twitter.The captain of the ship, US citizen Peter Willcox, was also given the same term. Willcox is a veteran Greenpeace activist who was captain of its ship the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed by the French secret service in port in New Zealand in 1985.The court earlier ruled that two Russians, Denis Sinyakov, a freelance photographer who works for Greenpeace and Greenpeace expert Roman Dolgov, should be detained for two months, Interfax news agency reported.

However one activist, Dmitri Litvinov, a Swede of Russian origin, was detained for only another 72 hours, Interfax reported, as the judge cited the fact he is the father of a young child. The court was holding simultaneous hearings in six different rooms of the building into a total of 30 detained activists from 18 different countries.—AFP