It’s more than the grizzly body count that’s numbed people on the small east Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus. The country may have…
It’s more than the grizzly body count that’s numbed people on the small east Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus.
The country may have experienced mass killings decades ago during inter-ethnic conflict, but the self-confessed crimes of an army captain are something new for the island of around 1 million people.
The captain, who has not been formally identified, has confessed to killing seven foreign women and girls and disposed of the bodies at an abandoned mineshaft, a poisonous lake, and a pit in the middle of a military firing range.
He is widely acknowledged to be Cyprus‘ first serial killer.
His crimes have raised disturbing questions over police ineptitude and even of racism. Cyprus wants answers to how the killer was able to go unnoticed for around two-and-a-half-years following the initial missing people’s reports.
Yiota Papadopoulou, the wife of prominent politician Nicholas Papadopoulos, has spoken of her inquiry October 2016 about the whereabouts of Livia Florentina Bunea who had vanished with her eight year-old daughter Elena Natalia.
A police officer said authorities had good reason to believe the 36-year-old Romanian had absconded with her child to the ethnically divided island nation’s breakaway Turkish Cypriot north.
„I believe that maybe, some other women could have been saved,“ she told public broadcaster RIK.
It was only the chance discovery of the bound body of 38-year-old Filipino Mary Rose Tiburcio down an abandoned mineshaft on April 14 that sparked a full investigation. That probe quickly led authorities to the suspect through Tiburcio’s online message exchange with the killer.
