Andrei Litvin said his client was suspected of extorting $350,000 from a witness in 2007 but had not been charged or questioned over the new accusations.
The lawyer said prosecutors were preparing a backup in case Khadzhikurbanov was found not guilty in the current trial. "If they acquit him in the Politkovskaya case then he can be held in the second criminal case," Litvin said.
Russian prosecutors on Thursday finished making their case against Khadzhikurbanov and two Chechen brothers accused in Politkovskaya's 2006 murder, a prosecutor said.
Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov are accused of conducting surveillance of Politkovskaya, while Khadzhikurbanov has been accused of assisting them.
Politkovskaya, who worked for the Moscow-based Novaya Gazeta paper, was shot dead in October 2006 in an elevator in her Moscow apartment building. Although little-known in Russia, the Kremlin critic had gained a degree of international recognition for her reports of military atrocities against civilians in the troubled Caucasus republic of Chechnya.
The man suspected of pulling the trigger - Rustam, the eldest of the three Makhmudov brothers - remains at large.
A former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer, Colonel Pavel Ryaguzov, has also been charged with telling the killers where Politkovskaya lived.
