Investigators examining the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya say they have identified her killer and are trying to track him down and arrest him.
The shooting in October 2006 of Politkovskaya, who was a critic of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, aroused international condemnation and calls for the killer to be found.
A prosecutor told a court hearing on Friday that "the perpetrator who committed the crime, the murder of Politkovskaya, has been established.
"All measures are being taken to track down and arrest this person."
The prosecutor did not name the person being sought.
Nine suspects have already been charged in the investigation, due to end in September, the prosecutor said.
Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper which Politkovskaya worked for, dismissed the news as a prosecutorial manoeuvre.
Muratov said the investigation had already announced last year it knew the name of the killer.
He said that the prosecutors now wanted to keep one of the accused, Colonel Pavel Ryaguzov of the Federal Security Service, in prison by saying someone else was still at-large.
Ryaguzov is in a detention centre on charges of abusing his office.
Investigators have alleged that Ryaguzov gave Politkovskaya's address to another suspect, who in turn passed the information on to the killer.