MOSCOW: Jurors in the trial of four men charged in connection with the 2006 murder of Russian journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya want it reopened to the media, one of the jurors said on Thursday.

Nineteen out of 20 jurors signed a statement on Thursday to the trial judge asking him to reverse a controversial decision to hold the trial behind closed doors, juror Yevgeny Kolesov told Echo of Moscow radio station.

Jurors also said they had not asked that the media be excluded, the justification given by the judge for his ruling on Wednesday, which infuriated the journalist's family and sparked allegations of a cover-up, Kolesov said.

"We asked only for the removal of television cameras, while we had no objection to the written media attending," he said, adding that one member of the jury panel of 12 jurors and eight reserve jurors had refused to sign.

Kolesov vigorously denied a claim by Judge Yevgeny Zubov, who is presiding over the case in a Moscow military court, that the jurors themselves had asked for a closed trial because they were afraid of being covered by the media.

"All the jurors were upset that we were presented in such a foolish light," he said, adding that they had been kept in the dark about Zubov's ruling, learning about it only afterwards from media reports.

The statement from the 19 jurors also disavowed that they had asked for a closed trial, said Kolesov, who added he would probably be kicked off the jury for going public. "I did not want to participate in an unjust trial," he said.

He also claimed that a court secretary had approached the jury on their first day at the trial and asked if they would like to sign a statement asking for the media to be removed, but the jurors did not agree to it.

A court spokesman, Alexander Minchanovsky, said he could not comment on Kolesov's allegations but confirmed that he had been a jury member. Kolesov identified himself as an alternate juror.

Politkovskaya's supporters were outraged by the decision to close the trial, in which four men are charged with helping organise the killing of the crusading reporter, who won fame for exposing human rights abuses in Chechnya.

None of the defendants are charged with actually killing Politkovskaya, who was shot dead near her Moscow home on October 7, 2006 in an apparent contract killing, and authorities have failed to identify the mastermind of the crime.
- AFP/de