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-enforcement agencies. On December 3, however, the local police chief told journalists that he could see “nothing criminal in Yuliy Mazur’s death.”