Paul Klebnikov went to Russia in 2004 to edit the Russian-language version of Forbes magazine. On July 9 of that year, he was gunned down in a contract-style killing.

Two Chechens and a Moscow lawyer have been charged in connection with his death and some other crimes, but Klebnikov's dying words were that his killer looked Russian. Maybe the trial will get to the bottom of this, but it's being held behind closed doors.

An excerpt from the Toronto Star story:

Many of Klebnikov's friends and colleagues are dismayed that the trial will not be held in open court and they're concerned that prosecutors don't seem to be following up on a number of other possible leads.

Alexei Brevnov, the Klebnikov family's representative in Moscow, says the family was deeply disappointed by the court's insistence that the proceedings be held in secret. Prosecutors argued that the trial had to be closed to the public in order to protect the methods used to track down the defendants.

"Paul's life was dedicated to making Russia more open and transparent and this would have been the perfect opportunity to show that openness matters," says Brevnov. "Paul's family argued to Russian authorities that this trial had to be open, but they were refused."

The move has led to suspicions that the evidence linking the accused to Klebnikov's killing is tenuous and some critics suspect investigators may have rushed to charge the three men in order to bring the investigation to a close as soon as possible.

"I have all indications that there is an excellent team of investigators on this case, but there's a lot of pressure on them and I believe there was pressure in making the announcement that Nukhayev was the mastermind," says Richard Behar, a New York-based investigative reporter who is heading up Project Klebnikov, an alliance of journalists investigating the killing.

"I don't think they are pursing too many possible leads other than Nukhayev as the mastermind, but there are at least four or five other possible threads."

In more than a decade of delving into the murky world of Russian business and politics, Klebnikov had racked up a long list of potential enemies.

Descended from aristocrats who fled the Bolshevik revolt of 1917, Klebnikov grew up in New York City's Russian émigré community.

He took a job at Forbes in 1989 and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, made regular trips to Russia to write about the enormous changes taking place in his family's homeland.

Klebnikov told some family members and colleagues shortly before his death that he had received documents containing extremely sensitive information. He did not reveal any details and the documents have never been found.

"I think he was killed because he went too far in some of his investigations that had not yet been published," says Alexander Gordeyev, the deputy editor of the Russian-language edition of Newsweek.

Gordeyev, the last person to speak to Klebnikov before his death, has also been critical of prosecutors for ignoring Klebnikov's dying words — that he was killed by a man of Russian appearance, not someone from the Caucasus region, where Chechnya is located.

"He told me as he lay there dying that it was a Russian man," Gordeyev says. "I asked him: `Could it have been a Caucasian?' He said no, it was a Russian."