Chechen accused in editor's slaying

MOSCOW -- Russian authorities yesterday accused a Chechen rebel leader of ordering the July 2004 slaying of magazine editor Paul Klebnikov, widely believed to be post-Soviet Russia's first slaying with an American journalist as a target.

Klebnikov, 41, was gunned down July 9 as he left the downtown Moscow office of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, where he was editor-in-chief. The slaying shook the journalism community in Russia, which has seen at least 11 journalists killed in contract slayings in the past five years.

Russian prosecutors said they believe Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, a former Chechen rebel commander and an alleged Russian mob figure, masterminded Klebnikov's slaying. Nukhayev was the focus of ''Conversations With a Barbarian," a book by Klebnikov published in 2003 that took a critical view of separatists in the breakaway southern Russian republic of Chechnya.

Prosecutors also named four other Chechen men they alleged were involved in Klebnikov's slaying. Two of the men, Kazbek Dukuzov and Musa Vakhayev, are in custody. The whereabouts of Nukhayev and the two other men are unknown.

Russian prosecutors said Nukhayev allegedly paid the other men an unspecified amount of money to kill Klebnikov in retaliation for his portrayal of the Chechen rebel leader in the book.

''That was a pretty tough book that may have offended some people," Leonid Bershidsky, publisher of Forbes Russia, said in an interview last September.

A US citizen of Russian descent, Klebnikov had been a journalist with Forbes since 1989. He moved to Moscow in 2003 to prepare the start of the business magazine's Russian edition.

The first issue was published in April 2004.