Police have so far found no evidence that the incident was linked to his work. His colleagues had, however, learned that he had received a threat a couple of months earlier from a man he had filmed who was diagnosed as carrying the HIV virus.

The murder took place at an uninhabited part of the oceanside drive, flanked by the sea on one side and scrubland on the other. There have been no arrests, no one identified as suspects and few witnesses. A boater and a family living in a nearby shack said they had heard shouts. A passing motorist stopped to give aid to Uicab as he lay injured.

The local state attorney’s office says the main piece of evidence it has is a somewhat disjointed and in parts contradictory statement from Uicab’s widow. "The investigation is being conducted in an objective manner and I tend to believe Mrs. Uicab, so long as there is nothing to incriminate her, but there are clear discrepancies in her statement," Assistant State Attorney Alfonso Chi Paredes said.

The crime has shocked the town where it occurred, the state capital, some 240 miles from Cancún. "This kind of case has a big impact here, as it is quite rare and the people get upset, And this is the first time any local journalist has been the victim of any crime," said Gerner Corona, news editor of the Diario de Quintana Roo newspaper, the first newsman to arrive on the murder scene.

There are no reliable crime statistics for Chetumal, but an open-air assault by a hooded man is certainly unusual, officials in the state attorney’s office said.

Guadalupe’s version

According to what Uicab’s wife, Guadalupe, told her family and the police and in the reconstruction she related to reporters, she and William stopped on their way home to chat in the oceanside highway, some 700 yards from the campus of the University of Quintana Roo – the nearest building along the two miles of the otherwise undeveloped roadside.

They were driving from dinner with the parents of the boyfriend of Guadalupe’s daughter Astrid to celebrate her engagement. "They were in a happy frame of mind, there was a full moon and they stopped to sit down and chat," said Gonzalo Hermosillo, a reporter who used to work with Uicab. There were dim street lights and no one around.

Guadalupe said that as they sat looking out to sea someone came up to her husband from behind, put a knife to his throat and threatened to kill him if he did not hand over his money. "William said he had nothing on him and to deal with him and leave his wife alone," Hermosillo quoted the wife’s statement to investigators as saying.

"William pushed his wife toward the ocean – there is a six-foot drop to the bay. She fell – and did not saw what happened next," Hermosillo said. According to forensic experts from the state attorney’s office, the moment Uicab pushed his wife away, the assailant became enraged and cut his victim’s throat, but he did not inflict a deep wound.

It was evident from his injuries that Uicab sought to defend himself. After a struggle, he too fell over he seawall. He and is wife tried to pull themselves up, to find no one was there any more, said Corona from Diario de Quintana Roo.

Guadalupe said that she then helped her husband to their car. She got about 150 yards along the road when she saw a Suburban SUV. She called for the driver to help. He apparently called the police. As Corona reconstructed the scene, it took about 50 minutes for paramedics to arrive.

Uicab sustained six wounds. He had a six-inch gash to the neck, two others to the forearm and shoulder and three to the abdomen – two of which punctured his liver, causing him to bleed to death.

The assistant state attorney’s version

According to the assistant state attorney, there are key discrepancies in the wife’s account of events. "She insists that it was a mugging, but she told the local auxiliary police officers, who were the first to arrive on the scene and interviewed her, that there were four assailants. Then she told us, and repeated it in her formal statement, that there was only one. However much she must have been in shock, it was a strange mistake to make," he said.

Guadalupe initially testified that the attacker had his face covered by a ski mask, then she said it was stocking. "We do not rule out that it was an assault, but we are trying to establish whether what the woman says is true, or if it could be a crime of passion," Chi Paredes added.

"The paramedic who arrived on the scene feels that she was acting – she shed no tears, nothing," the official said. The Red Cross took seven minutes to get to the scene after being notified, and found Uicab lying mortally wounded. He died 20 minutes later. Chi Paredes suggests that the wife deliberately took a long time to call for help. "We still do not know why she did not react more quickly, or why she did not take him to hospital." He did not believe it was because she was distraught.

Journalists at Channel 8 and Diario de Quintana Roo recalled there had been two other recent assaults on the oceanside drive, but closer to the city. "People here have nothing else to do but go hang out there," said Gerner Corona. One of the victims was knifed in the face.

Few leads

In Chi Paredes’ opinion, there is no evidence so far that the motive for the attack on Uicab was related to his work., and instead it is being investigated as a possible mugging or crime of passion. "Right now I do not link it to his work, because he was a TV cameraman, and the relationship with the government certainly is critical, but we do not believe that has anything to do with it," said Uicab’s former boss at Channel 8, Jorge Carrillo Beltrán.

"We have dealt with a lot of serious issues, but nothing that extreme," said Gonzalo Hermosillo, a reporter who worked alongside Uicab for two years.

Hermosillo and his boss, Jorge Carrillo, recall only one thorny issue that had led to a threat against Uicab. "We are checking the tapes. It was one of the few jobs he did on his own. There was a death threat," Hermosillo said. He was referring to a taping Uicab had done a couple of months earlier on the arrest of a man diagnosed as carrying the HIV virus and accused of attempting to kill his brother-in-law, who had been warning that his relative had AIDS and was deliberately trying to infect his sexual partners.

"We did not think too much about it and we did not follow it up. That was the only threat that William had received," Carrillo Beltrán of Channel 8 said. He did not know if the man was ever formally charged or freed from custody. "We have never reported the threat, because they could detain that man at any time, even though he may not be guilty. We are waiting," he said.

According to Chi Paredes, the case is based fundamentally on Mr. Uicab’s statement. The idea that it was a mugging comes solely from there and the notion that it might have been a crime of passion, from her contradictory remarks.