Chechens arrested in connection with journalist's murder

Moscow police have arrested two Chechen men suspected of taking part in the murder of American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the city’s police chief said today.

Police seized three guns from the two Chechen men who were detained overnight, Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin said.

He added that the two suspects had kidnapped an unidentified person prior to the killing of Klebnikov, the editor of Forbes magazine’s Russian edition.

Pronin did not provide any additional details of the investigation, and did not say if police had established a motive of Klebnikov’s killing on July 9.

Klebnikov, an American of Russian ancestry, was gunned down outside the magazine’s office in Moscow.

Since Klebnikov’s death, speculation surrounding a possible motive for his killing has focused on his writing about the often-murky world of Russian business.

But some commentators have said a Chechen link was also possible, pointing to Klebnikov’s book based on his interviews with Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, a former deputy prime minister in the Chechen separatist government, which was published last year.

The book, “Conversations With a Barbarian,” cast Nukhayev and other Chechen rebels in a negative light, and some Russian observers had suggested that it could have provoked the killing.