Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko ordered a special investigation into the apparent killing of an ethnic Tartar journalist, according to an Interfax news agency report.
"The president is shocked at the outrageous killing of Norik Shirin," Yushchenko's spokeswoman Irina Bannikova said.
Relatives found Shirin, 23, dead from a single knife wound in a garage in the Crimean regional capital Simferpol on Wednesday. Law enforcers classified the death a probable murder on Thursday.
Shirin had been publisher and editor of a Tartar-language newspaper, and the chairman of an ethnic Tartar youth organization in Ukraine's restive Crimea province.
Crimea's population is roughly one-third ethnic Russians, one- third ethnic Ukrainians, and one-third ethnic Tartars.
The Slavic Russians and Ukrainians typically follow the Christian Orthodox faith and are usually economically better off than Muslim Tartars, who often live in poorer parts of the peninsula.
Police were not ruling out economic motives for the killing as Shirin was known to have received earlier this month a license to operate a youth radio station, potentially making him an extortion target for organized crime.
Journalist killings have been a touchy subject in Ukraine since September 2000, when Internet magazine editor Georgy Gongadze was murdered and buried in in forest outside Kiev.
At the time Gongadze's web magazine, Ukrainska Pravda, was practically the country's only media offering independent news and criticism of the government.
A series of Ukrainian administrations over the next half-decade dawdled on prosecuting Gongadze's killers.
Yushchenko after taking office in 2005 declared bringing Gongadze's murders to justice "a matter of honour."
Two accomplices in the crime are standing trial, but the actual killer remains at large, according to police possibly in Russia or Israel.
