Moscow  - New court proceedings in the murder of journalist Anna Politskovskaya are to start on August 5, her family disclosed Wednesday, according to the Interfax agency.

The family said first hearings and clarification of trial issues would take place on that day in the proceedings ordered after Russia's Russia's Supreme Court on June 25 had ordered a retrial of four men previously acquitted in the case.

Politkovskaya, a Kremlin critic and investigative journalist for the Novaya Gazeta, was gunned down in a contract-style killing in her Moscow apartment block in October
2006.

Many people in Russia believe the killing was politically motivated due to her critical reporter about the human rights situation in Chechnya.

The Supreme Court's judges agreed to an appeal from the general prosecutor's office to overturn the February 19 acquittal verdict, reached by a jury in a lower Moscow court.

That jury had agreed with defence 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 security service, was accused of providing the killer with Politkovskaya's address.

News of the new trial comes a week after the killing of human rights activist Natalya Estemirova who, like Politskovskaya, had reported on crimes against the civilian population of Chechnya.(dpa)