BOSTON (Reuters) - Fortress Investment Group LLC told investors yesterday that they won't be able to get their money back for a while, becoming the latest hedge fund firm to suspend redemptions as investors try to exit.

Fortress, one of only a small number of publicly traded hedge fund and private equity groups, said its board of directors unanimously agreed to temporarily suspend pending redemptions after investors asked to pull out roughly $3.51 billion by year's end from its Drawbridge funds.

The news helped push the company's share price down 25.6 percent to trade at $1.86 in afternoon dealings. They fell as low as $1.71 at one point.

Fortress estimates that the Drawbridge Global Macro Master Fund Ltd and its three feeder funds will have approximately $3.65 billion in assets under management on January 1.

At the end of the third quarter, Fortress said it managed $34.3 billion in assets.

Fortress founder and chief executive officer Wes Edens had braced for redemptions and told investors on a conference call last month that the company, like the rest of the industry, would likely face more of these requests in the "grim" market environment.

Suspending redemptions was once a sign that a fund was about to fail, but it is now a much more accepted tool to safeguard capital — for a while at least, industry lawyers said. They added that managers are no longer ashamed to say they aren't letting investors out just yet.