A JOURNALIST investigating EU corruption was raped and murdered as a “warning”, it was claimed yesterday.

Bulgarian Viktoria Marinova, 30, had been working on a probe into European money being channelled to tycoons.

A post mortem found she had been sexually assaulted and suffered blows to the head before being suffocated.

Her body was found on Saturday in a riverside park in Ruse, northern Bulgaria.

Prosecutors said her phone, car keys, glasses and some of her clothes were missing in a case that has sparked an international outcry.

Viktoria presented current affairs programme Detector for local television channel TVN.

Police insisted there was no evidence to suggest the murder was related to her work.

But Asen Yordanov, owner of Stoyanov’s Bivol.bg investigative website, said: “The brutal manner in which she was killed is an execution. It was meant to serve as a warning.”

The European Commission’s Frans Timmerman said: “Again a courageous journalist falls in the fight for truth and against corruption.”