A Moscow court has suspended Paul Klebnikov murder trial as one of three defendants went missing, the Associated Press reported on March 14.

The Moscow City Court judge issued an arrest warrant for missing defendant Kazbek Dukuzov, who is accused of involvement in the killing of Paul Klebnikov, the U.S.-born editor of Forbes magazine’s Russian edition.

Another defendant, Musa Vakhayev, attended the session on Wednesday, a court spokesman said. The two men had been free since a jury acquitted them last year, but the Supreme Court later overturned the acquittal and ordered a new trial.

The third man linked to the case, Moscow notary Fail Sadretdinov, was convicted in January on an unrelated crime and sentenced to nine years in prison.

The defendants’ lawyers criticized the retrial as politically driven, and said authorities were pressuring the court to convict the defendants. President Vladimir Putin last year praised the Supreme Court’s decision to order a retrial.

Prosecutors have claimed that Dukuzov and Vakhayev killed Klebnikov on behalf of Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, who was the subject of Klebnikov’s book “Conversations With a Barbarian.” Nukhayev remains at large.

Critics of Russia’s justice system, which is widely seen as lacking independence from the Kremlin, have said prosecutors failed to properly pursue other lines of investigation.

Paul Klebnikov, 41, an American of Russian origin who was editor of Forbes magazine’s Russian edition, was gunned down outside its Moscow offices in July 2004. Many believed the killing was connected to Klebnikov’s work investigating corruption and Russia’s shadowy business world.

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