Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was gunned down in a contract-style killing outside her Moscow apartment block in October 2006. Her family and colleagues believe the murder was politically motivated.

The Kremlin critic was shot dead two days before her paper was due to publish her latest report on torture and the human rights situation in Chechnya in the Northern Caucasus.

Russia's supreme court agreed to an appeal from the general prosecutor's office to overturn the Feb. 19 acquittal verdict, reached by a jury in a lower Moscow court.

That jury had agreed with defense claims of insufficient evidence tying the four suspects to the crime.

In the trial, prosecutors had accused two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, of being accomplices, and former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov of helping the killer get away.

The fourth defendant, Pavel Ryaguzov, was acquitted in a separate case. Ryaguzov, an agent of Russia's FSB intelligence service, was accused of providing the killer with Politkovskaya's address.

Thursday's decision marks a new twist in a protracted legal battle to establish who was behind the assassination of the 48-year-old journalist. The announcement comes weeks after the killing of human rights activist Natalya Estemirova who, like Politskovskaya, had reported on crimes against the civilian population of Chechnya.

nrt/Reuters/AFP/dpa

Editor: Tony Dunham