U.S. calls on Russia to find U.S. reporter's killers

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A top U.S. official used a visit by President Barack Obama on Tuesday to call on Russia to bring to justice those behind the 2004 murder of American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the editor of the Russian version of Forbes.

Klebnikov's death aged 41 provoked international condemnation and his family has repeatedly called on the Kremlin to prosecute his killers.

U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns joined several hundred people at a service at Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral marking five years since Klebnikov's murder.

"After five long years, we urge the Russian authorities to redouble their efforts to bring to justice those responsible for Paul's murder," Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, said at a speech during the service.

Klebnikov's killers, and those who ordered the murder, are still at large. The two men suspected of executing the murder were acquitted by a jury at a trial in 2006.

The family of Klebnikov had called on Obama to push Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at two days of meetings in Moscow to ensure the authorities track down his killers.

Obama on Tuesday told Russian students an independent media was essential to expose corruption in business and government, but he has so far not publicly raised the issue of murdered reporters.

After the ceremony in Moscow, Klebnikov's widow Musa said the Russian authorities had for the first time agreed to accept assistance from the U.S. Department of Justice.

"This idea came up today and they seemed enthusiastic, so let's see if anything comes out of it," she said.

She said that the issue was included among Obama's talking points for his meetings with Medvedev, but that she had not heard what the two leaders said about it.

The killing has come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks after Russian detectives said they had closed -- and then reopened -- the murder investigation.

Russia is ranked as the world's third most dangerous place for reporters by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which lists 50 journalists killed there since 1992. Only Iraq and Algeria had more.

One of the most prominent journalist murders of recent years was the 2006 killing of Kremlin foe Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper which Obama granted an interview to before his visit.

Politkovskaya's children attended the memorial service for Klebnikov along with diplomats and prominent figures such as Natalia Solzhenitsyn, the widow of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

"He was a Russian man, an Orthodox believer, he wanted to help Russia and he was killed, and we, as Russian people, feel guilt and grief that we did not save him," she said at the cathedral doors.

Klebnikov, a U.S. citizen whose grandparents fled Russia during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, reported on a world where Russian business, politics and organized crime overlapped.

He was shot as he left his office in central Moscow on July 9, 2004. He later died of his injuries in a lift which stalled at a Moscow hospital.

(Editing by Matthew Jones)