After a five-day delay, the Cypriot police were forced to admit that the 25-year-old Pakistani man found dead in an open area in Nicosia on Epiphany had been fatally shot by a police officer.
The Cypriot police have reportedly attempted to cover up the death since the body was found in a different area from the one where the shooting took place.
Nonetheless, the coroner ruled out the possibility of the police committing a criminal act despite the fact that the 24-year-old’s body had a bullet hole in the right shoulder blade. Even after the admission of a police officer’s involvement in the death, no one was arrested or suspended.
Shooting on the United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus
On Epiphany, police officers responded to cars driving in Potamia, just outside Nicosia. According to the police, they were most likely migrant smugglers who were using unguarded passages from the Turkish-occupied areas of Cyprus to the free areas.
The police officers, as they testified, tried to obstruct the smugglers, and a car drove towards them, forcing them to shoot at the tyres and in the air. The migrant smugglers managed to escape, while three police officers were injured in a collision and went to the hospital.
They also gave a statement to the local police station, without mentioning anything about injuries from the shooting, claiming that they had not seen anything like this since they were shooting in the air and at the tyres of the cars. That case had no further follow-up.
Body in Nicosia
A few hours later, a 25-year-old man from Pakistan was found dead and half-naked in a parking lot in Nicosia. There was no connection to the shootings.
The forensic pathologist Nikolas Charalambous, who performed the autopsy, stated that there was no suspicion of criminal activity and a hole in the victim’s shoulder blade was attributed to an accidental injury from a small stone that had entered the wound.
Police did not proceed with any investigation and transferred the body to the morgue. The spot where the body was found was not sealed off and no tests were carried out for traces of possible involvement of other individuals.
In fact, the case was handled by a local police station and not the Crime Investigation Department.
After four days, an autopsy was performed, and the same forensic doctor who had ruled out foul play announced that the foreigner had died from a bullet that entered through the right shoulder blade and hit his vital organs.
Again, any connection with the shooting incident was not made.
However, Cyprus Times revealed that the bullet in the foreigner’s body was of 9mm calibre, which is the calibre of ammunition used by the police and the only shooting incident recorded on the day the body was found was the one involving police officers, many kilometres away.
The police were forced to request the officers’ weapons for ballistics testing, which revealed that the bullet that killed the 25-year-old Pakistani had come from a police officer’s gun.
So far, no arrests have been made, and no one has been suspended. Also, much of the evidence that would have been useful in the investigation has either been destroyed or altered since the site where the body was found was not guarded to identify evidence.
It also remains unanswered how the body was transferred from the shooting scene to the location where it was found, with the obvious aim of disconnecting the death from the human smuggling incident.
READ MORE: Greece and Saudi Arabia Deepen Strategic Ties with Launch of Supreme Cooperation Council.