May 5 (Bloomberg) -- A Russian jury absolved two Chechens in the murder of Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of Forbes Inc.'s Russian edition whose killing in 2004 heightened concerns about press freedoms in the former Soviet state.
Kazbek Dukuzov and Musa Vakhayev were found not guilty today by a jury of eight women and four men after a three-month closed trial in Moscow, a spokesman for the Klebnikov family who observed the trial said via telephone. The men were caught in Minsk, Belarus, in November 2004, four months after Klebnikov was gunned down while leaving his office. A third man accused of helping to organize the killing, Fail Sadretdinov, also was found not guilty.
Prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin said the men were hired to kill Klebnikov by Kozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, a Chechen separatist leader who was the subject of a critical book by Klebnikov titled, ``Conversations with a Barbarian.'' Shokhin headed the prosecution of OAO Yukos Oil Co. owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is serving eight years in prison for fraud and tax evasion in a case the U.S. and EU called politically motivated.
Klebnikov's family has questioned Nukhayev's link to the murder. Their calls for an open trial to ensure fairness were rejected. Prosecutors argued that a closed trial was needed to protect their methods of investigation.
Alexei Brevnov, the family's representative in Moscow, was not immediately available for comment. ``The family has been closely following the court proceedings through their lawyers,'' he said earlier today.
`Godfather of the Kremlin'
Klebnikov, the son of Russian émigrés, made a name for himself covering the rise of the nation's most influential businessmen following the collapse of communism. He was killed just months after putting together Forbes's first ranking of Russia's richest people, a list headed by Khodorkovsky.
In ``The Godfather of the Kremlin,'' Klebnikov accused self-exiled billionaire Boris Berezovsky of building his fortune by siphoning money from state companies. Berezovsky won a libel suit against Klebnikov in England in 2003, forcing Forbes's U.S. edition to retract the allegations it originally published.
``Conversations With a Barbarian'' focused on Klebnikov's interviews with Nukhayev and on organized crime in Chechnya, where separatists have been trying to establish a Muslim state for more than a decade. Russia has sent troops into the region twice since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and still has tens of thousands of soldiers there.
Putin's Hotel Room
Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Klebnikov's widow, Musa, and brother Peter on Sept. 15 in his room in New York's Waldorf Astoria during a trip to the United Nations. Putin, who had exchanged letters with the family, ``reaffirmed'' his commitment to finding those responsible, brother Michael said following the meeting.
Klebnikov was at the time the 11th journalist to be murdered in a contract-style killing since Putin took office in 2000. No one has been brought to justice in any of the killings, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Violence against journalists in Russia is ``frequent and impunity prevails,'' Paris-based Reporters Without Borders concluded in its annual survey this year.
In 2005, Pavel Makeev, cameraman for the TV station Puls d'Azov in the Rostov-on-Don region, and Magomedzagid Varisov, a reporter for the weekly Novoye Delo in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, were murdered. The leader of a press group survived a murder attempt in the southwestern city of Samara.
Eight journalists were physically attacked and eight others arrested last year, according to Reporters Without Borders.
