Mexico City, Mexico (CNN) -- The shooting death of a Mexican journalist last week was not due to his work but was related to a "personal problem," a Chihuahua state attorney's office spokesman said Monday.
"His murder is not related to his work as a journalist," spokesman Carlos Gonzalez-Estrada said.
The announcement came one day after the newspaper for which slain photographer Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco worked published an open letter to the drug cartels operating in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.
The letter, written by the editorial staff of El Diario newspaper, pleaded with the drug gangs to end violence against journalists.
"You are, at present, the de facto authorities in this city," the Juarez newspaper's letter to the cartels said, "because the legal institutions have not been able to keep our colleagues from dying".
Santiago, 21, was killed Thursday evening while sitting in a parked car outside a shopping mall in Juarez. He was the second journalist from the paper to be killed in the past two years.
CNN
