A Moscow court approved the arrest of three people suspected of involvement in the murder of Russian deputy central bank chief Andrei Kozlov, a court spokeswoman said on Monday.
Kozlov, deputy chairman of the central bank, was gunned down on September 13 outside a sports stadium in Moscow in the highest-profile assassination in Moscow since President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.
"A decision has been taken to arrest three suspects in the investigation into the murder of Andrei Kozlov," said Moscow City Court spokeswoman Anna Usachyova. She gave no details. The Prosecutor General's office on Monday issued a statement saying that it had identified "people linked to organising and carrying out the crime".
Russian police and prosecutors had earlier denied media reports that Kozlov's murderers had been detained and that they had confessed to taking part in the murder.
The Kommersant business daily said three men from the Ukrainian city of Luhansk had been hired by an unidentified middleman to track Kozlov's movements and received an order to shoot him and his driver with only a few minutes' notice. The paper said that at least one of the three had turned himself in to the police, fearing that those who ordered the murder could kill him as well.
Kommersant said the three suspects had not given investigators any clues about who hired them. However, the paper said police had focused their search on bankers who could have had problems with Kozlov in a period of two months before the murder.
Russian investigations into the murder of prominent officials or businessmen sometimes end by identifying the killers but rarely succeed in bringing those who ordered the murder to justice.
The Prosecutor-General's office said it would examine how information about the sensitive crime could have leaked to media and the decide how to proceed with the suspects.
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