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Odessa, Ukraine - Jewish community leaders in southern Ukraine have protested to the central government over a real estate project planned on a Holocaust grave site

The Jewish Council of Odessa, a Black Sea port city, in an open letter to Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said plans to revamp the town's Tolbukhin Square should be stopped out of respect to possibly tens of thousands of persons killed and buried there during the Second World War.

An estimated 25,000 Jews and other victims were murdered in 1941 at the present site of Tolbukhin Square by invading German and Romanian forces.

Odessa city police said that they had recently inspected the planned construction site and rejected that it had ever been a mass grave.

Historians however generally confirm Axis troops shot or burned alive the bulk of Odessa's Jewish population on the site, during October 23-24 massacres.

"The only possible moral decision is no new construction in the area whatsoever," said Bogeslav Kapulkin, a Jewish community spokesman. "Given the crimes that took place there...it can only be a memorial."

Odessa city government willingness to let construction go forward "flies in the face of the behaviour of civilized nations," Kapulkin said.

Odessa's present Tolbukhin square at the outbreak of the war was an walled depot used by Axis forces as a detention centre for unwanted persons particularly Jews. German and Romanian police units in late October 1941 killed by shooting or burning alive almost all the depot's inhabitants, burying many of them underneath what became Tolbukhin Square.

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Someone came and stole some of the remains of the victims of the mass grave.

Local residents photographed and videotaped the grisly discovery of the remains, but during the night, cars came to the site and took the remains away.

Police are investigating the incident.