The 30-year-old man, identified only as Alikhan M. in line with Polish privacy laws, was arrested Wednesday night in front of his Warsaw apartment, police spokeswoman Dorota Tietz said.
The man was on an international wanted list and was seeking refugee status in Poland under an assumed name, Tietz said.
Polish authorities had no details about Alikhan M.'s alleged role in the ambush. They added that he could be extradited as early as next week.
Moscow city police put him on a wanted list for his purported role in a June 2002 assassination attempt on Ordzhonikidze, then Mayor Yury Luzhkov's deputy in charge of the city's lucrative hotel, gambling and construction businesses.
Ordzhonikidze was being driven to work along Rublyovskoye Shosse when a BMW forced his car to the side of the road. Two masked gunmen jumped out of the BMW and opened fire with assault rifles. Ordzhonikidze's bodyguard Alexander Golikov, who had gotten out of the bullet-proof car, was wounded in the chest but returned fire and hit one of the gunmen.
The gunman was pulled into the BMW, which sped away. Police later said they found a body near the burned-out getaway car in a nearby empty lot with a passport identifying him as Salavat Dzhabrailov, cousin of Moscow-based Chechen businessman Umar Dzhabrailov.
The attack came a day before Ordzhonikidze, now an adviser to Luzhkov, planned to terminate a management contract between city-controlled Radisson-Slavjanskaya and Dzhabrailov's company.
Dzhabrailov said at the time that the assassination attempt was a setup aimed at blackening his name and that his cousin had been kidnapped. (AP, MT)
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