One of the defendants, Kazbek Dukuzov, failed to appear in court Wednesday, and the judge issued a warrant for his arrest.
"The Moscow City Court decided to suspend hearings of this criminal case," the judge said, adding that another defendant, Musa Vakhayev, who had given a pledge not to leave the city, attended the court session.
Vakhayev and Dukuzov are to be retried in the Klebnikov case in keeping with a November 2006 Supreme Court ruling that overturned their acquittal in the initial trial.
Both men were released from detention in May 2006 after a Moscow court declared them not guilty of murdering the Forbes editor in Moscow in July 2004.
Vakhayev and Dukuzov failed to appear at a court session February 15, and hearings had to be postponed.
A third suspect, Fail Sadretdinov, was also cleared of murder charges last May, but sentenced in January to nine years in prison for property fraud in a separate case relating to his work as a public notary.
Sadretdinov's lawyer, Ruslan Koblev said Dukuzov is allegedly in the hospital in Chechnya, and the defense team had asked that hearings be postponed for a week. But the court supported the prosecutors and issued the arrest warrant.
Koblev also said the defense team intended to seek an open trial, and quoted Sadretdinov as saying that "new materials, which could have been fabricated, appeared in the case."
A U.S. journalist of Russian descent, Klebnikov, 41, worked for Forbes since 1989 and became the first editor of Forbes Russia when it was launched in April 2004. He earned himself an international reputation for investigating murky business dealings and corruption in the post-Soviet era.
