Moscow ? Russian police detained a suspect Thursday in the killing last year of a senior central bank official who was trying to clean up the country’s banking industry.

The Prosecutor General’s Office said the suspect, identified only as the head of a large commercial enterprise, was taken into custody in a dawn raid.

Defense attorney Igor Trunov said Thursday that his client, one-time banker Alexei Frenkel, had been detained and was notified by prosecutors that he was a suspect in the murder investigation. He will face a court hearing today, Trunov said.

Trunov said Frenkel denied involvement in the killing. He said prosecutors had detained two other people in the case, both of whom were later released.

Frenkel was chief executive officer of VIP Bank, one of many financial institutions closed in the past three years by the central bank on the initiative of Andrei Kozlov, the central bank’s first deputy chairman. Kozlov was shot point-blank in the head Sept. 13 as he left a soccer game for bank employees in Moscow.