Cypriot police are being criticized lately for allegedly turning a blind eye on the disappearances of Filipino women in Cyprus that turned out to be a serial killing and one of the biggest crimes in Cyprus history.
Hundreds of people, including members of the Filipino community, attended a protest vigil outside the presidential palace to mourn the victims and to question whether authorities failed to adequately investigate when women who worked in low-paying jobs vanished.
The main opposition party, the left-wing AKEL, called for the resignation of Cyprus’s justice minister and police chief over claims police failed to take the women’s disappearances seriously.
Athens-based newspaper Ekathemerini reported that a 38-year old Filipina, Mary Rose Tiburcio, was missing on May 5, 2018 after she did not show up as expected and that the victim had communicated in an online dating site with a man only known as “Orestis.”
Also missing was Mary Rose’s six-year-old daughter Sierra Graze Seucalliuc.
But Cyprus police association members countered saying that privacy laws in Cyprus are “too strict” and made it difficult for investors to snoop at phone records or social media accounts of missing people.
But Ekathemerini quoted legal experts as saying that police investigators can apply for a warrant from a judge to peak through the records especially if “circumstances of a case.”
Mary Rose and another Filipina Arian Palanas Lozano, 28, were found dead in an abandoned flooded mineshaft in Cyprus earlier this month. Lozano was also reported missing May last year.
Another woman’s corpse, already on an advanced state of decomposition, was found last week nine miles away from the mineshaft, and believed to be the body of another Filipina who went missing in December 2017.
An Army captain, identified as Nikos Metaxas, was arrested.
Later, he admitted to killing the two Filipinas, and hurt the six-year-old child.
Cypriot authorities are still searching other location west of the capital Nicosia for four bodies, including two children, based on accounts of Metaxas.
A leader of the Filipino community also expressed dismay that reports of missing foreigners like Filipinos are not immediately followed up.
“They said they probably crossed to the north. Now it has come to this,” Ester Beatty, chairperson of the Federation of Filipino Organisations of Cyprus, told Cyprus Mail.
Yesterday, a robotic camera found suitcases at the bottom of a man-made lake.
Officers have been searching three different locations west of the capital Nicosia for a further four victims, including two children, based on what Mr Metaxas has told them.
A team of British detectives are due to arrive on the island next week to help with the investigation, police said.
