| "Mazur's colleagues suspected their editor had been poisoned." � Committee to Protect Journalists |
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 Another editor, Yuly Mazur of the Odessa daily Yug, was also presumed to have been murdered for his journalistic work in 2000, although CPJ could not identify a clear motive for the killing. Mazur's body was found on the street in Odessa. An official autopsy concluded that the cause of death was ethyl alcohol intoxication. His colleagues, however, insisted that he had never drunk alcohol and had received threatening phone calls prior to his death. Yug had recently run a series of articles implicating a local police chief in corruption. [...] Mazur, the 63-year-old editor of the independent Russian-Ukrainian daily Yug, was found late at night near his house in Odessa. He died before an ambulance could take him to the hospital. Forensic experts attributed the death to "ethyl alcohol intoxication," Mazur's colleagues told the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN. However, Mazur's colleagues suspected their editor had been poisoned. They said he was a teetotaler who had recently received telephone death threats, which they believed were provoked by Yug articles about corruption in local law enforcementy agencies. On December 3, however, the local police chief told journalists that he could see "nothing criminal in Yuly Mazur's death." Excerpted from the Committee to Protect Journalists report on Ukraine in the year 2000 at www.cpj.org/attacks00/europe00/Ukraine.html. |