Cyprus Mail: News Articles in English, 00-04-22

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From: The Cyprus Mail at <http://www.cyprus-mail.com/>

Saturday, April 22, 2000

CONTENTS

[01] Two suspects sought in connection with tourist’s murder

[02] Neophytou to raise Eurocypria fears with Cyprus Airways

[03] Traders say fall in share prices an expected correction

[04] More missing expected to be identified by DNA tests

[05] Savvides probing claims that Cypriot hospital waste ended up in Egypt

[06] Back in Cyprus to find her real mother

[07] Nine in a house with no water or electricity

[01] Two suspects sought in connection with tourist’s murder

POLICE said yesterday they were looking for two young men in connection with the murder of a 41-year-old British tourist in Limassol.

Police yesterday named the victim as Graham Mills, an accountant from Tring in Hertfordshire, who arrived on the island on Saturday.

He was found battered to death on Thursday morning near the old port of Limassol.

He had been staying at a Yermasoyia hotel, whose staff had reported him missing since Wednesday afternoon.

Police said they were keen to talk to two suspects who had left a bar where the victim was last seen on the night of Wednesday to Thursday, and returned afterwards with muddy shoes.

This would appear to confirm reports that Mills had been seen arguing outside the bar with two Greek Cypriot men, whom he followed when they left the bar.

His body was found at 2am, face down in the mud by two soldiers.

Mills’ sister and brother-in-law arrived on the island yesterday afternoon to identify the body.

They were met at the airport by British High Commissioner Edward Clay, who is believed to be personally looking into the case.

Pathologist Sophocles Sophocleous, who carried out an autopsy where the body was found, said he found lacerations to Mills’ head and face, indicating he had died from multiple blows with a blunt instrument, possibly a metal crowbar.

The murder weapon has not been found, despite an extensive police land and sea search.

Forensic evidence suggests the man was beaten to death 30 metres from where he was found, and probably dragged towards the sea in an attempt to dispose of the body.

Police said a motorcycle found in the sea near the Famagusta Sailing Club a couple of kilometres away could have been used by the perpetrators to flee the scene.

They have ruled out theft as a motive for the killing, since money and personal effects were found on the victim.

Saturday, April 22, 2000

[02] Neophytou to raise Eurocypria fears with Cyprus Airways

COMMUNICATIONS and Works Minister Averoff Neophytou yesterday said he would raise the concerns of Eurocypria pilots with Cyprus Airways (CY) bosses.

Neophytou, who met early yesterday with the charter firm’s pilots, told the Cyprus Mail he had listened to their concerns and promised to pass them on to CY chairman Haris Loizides.

Eurocypria pilots on Wednesday revealed that CY was planning to violate a binding labour agreement with the charter firm to ward off any possible trouble by its own pilots.

CY pilots union Pasipy has long coveted captain positions in Eurocypria, a desire which last year led to two crippling strikes over one such vacancy.

However, a labour arbitration board ruled in favour of Eurocypria pilots, whose collective agreement clearly states that co-pilots must have three years within the company to fill a captain vacancy.

Despite the ruling, the Eurocypria pilots now say that CY has asked them to accept a new deal, which would involve Pasipy pilots receiving two out of every three captain vacancies in the charter firm.

They say they will not accept this violation of their collective agreement and are calling on Neophytou and on Labour Minister Andreas Moushiouttas to help because they believe they are getting a raw deal.

They said CY told them they had every intention of carrying out the proposal in favour of Pasipy, whether Eurocypria pilots agreed or not.

The charter firm’s pilots, who work more hours for less pay than their CY counterparts, believe CY is sacrificing them to satisfy Pasipy because management fears a strike by the national carrier’s pilots and is willing to go to any lengths to prevent it, including breaking legally binding agreements.

However Neophytou said since that the issue was a labour one, there was little he could do. "But I will try to pass on their opinion and have a talk with the chairman when he returns from abroad," he said.

The Minister said the charter firm’s pilots told him of their fears CY would override their collective agreement. "They said so but I will have to cross check it," he said.

Neophytou said efforts are ongoing from all sides to try and solve all of the problems within the national carrier. "We are trying to overcome them," he said.

Saturday, April 22, 2000

[03] Traders say fall in share prices an expected correction

SHARE prices ended off for the second day running yesterday as stocks moved rangebound, with the all-share index trading in a narrow band and all sectors closing with losses.

The all-share index opened with losses and marginally spiked before losing momentum, closing 1.6 per cent down to 541.61 points on a traded value of £38.8 million, some eight million lower than on Thursday.

There were more than 10,000 deals on 111 company securities traded.

Several sessions of considerable gains this month made the climate conducive for profit-taking, traders said.

"A very rapid upsurge will bring a correction and that is very normal," said Socratis Georgiades from Argus Financial Services.

Commercial shares led declines with 3.30 per cent trimmed off the sector index. Mallouppas and Papacostas fell 19 cents to £2.90 while Ceilfloor, Woolworth and Cyprus Trading Corporation were off between 10 and 17 cents.

Banking sector declines were on a par with the fall in the all-share index at 1.6 per cent. Laiki and Bank of Cyprus fell 14 and 17 cents respectively, while smaller declines were registered for Hellenic and Universal Savings Bank.

Bank of Cyprus shares have been falling since chairman Solon Triantafyllides avoided giving shareholders a firm date for the bank’s Athens debut at its AGM on Wednesday. The bank did, however, announce it would give bonus shares to shareholders and disclosed plans to spin off its real estate Kermia division.

"There is a bit of a paradox here. What is important to shareholders at the moment is that the board of directors could not give a date for Athens but the bank was right in saying it could not predict," said stockbroker Harris Savvides of Laiki Investments.

"One would have expected that with a bonus and the spinoff which was announced the share price would have been kept at higher levels," he told Mega Television.

Still, he said that market returns in the past three weeks had been in the region of 10 to 12 per cent, so it was normal for investors to try to realise some profits.

"There are good prospects for good shares. Investors should be prudent and listen to advice, not rumours," he said.

Louis Cruise Lines was the most traded share yesterday with 2.5 million changing hands as it slipped six cents to £2.04. Earlier, the company said that it would contemplate incorporating 51 per cent of sister division Louis Hotels in return for equity.

On a weekly basis, the market has ended unchanged, while traded values rose 28 per cent on a weekly basis to exceed £45 million. Total volumes of the week reached £277 million, while market capitalisation climbed 1.2 per cent to reach £11.4 billion.

The banking sector remains the predominant one in the capitalisation makeup at some 49.2 per cent, with the "other" company sector following at 15 per cent.

Meanwhile, the bourse announced yesterday that software company L.

K.

Globasoft.

com would make its debut on April 26 with a massive issue of 127 million shares with a nominal value of five cents each.

There were also persistent rumours flying on the market yesterday that co- op investment firm Demetra would float its shares on the market the day after, on April 27. The CSE is expected to make an announcement on Monday.

Saturday, April 22, 2000

[04] More missing expected to be identified by DNA tests

A SMALL number of persons listed as missing are expected to be identified next month when the latest round of DNA testing is completed.

Yesterday President Glafcos Clerides met members of the committee for relatives of missing persons to discuss developments.

Committee chairman Nicos Theodosiou confirmed that a small number of missing persons would probably be identified through the DNA procedure by the middle of next month.

"There is no specific numbers but we know that in a few weeks there will be an announcement of the results in which we believe there might be small group of missing persons," he said.

Theodosiou said they had also discussed with the President the appointment of a third member to the tripartite Committee for Missing Persons.

UN-appointed member Jean Pierre Ritter died suddenly in his Swiss home earlier this year and has not yet been replaced.

Also under discussion were ways to raise the missing issue at the next round of UN-led proximity talks due to take place in New York on May 23.

The committee also raised with Clerides the possibility of expanding the exhumations process to the occupied areas in line with the agreement reached between the two sides in July 1997 on the exchange of information on missing persons.

The exhumation process, which began almost a year ago and which was initiated by the Clerides government, thrust the issue back into the political arena and forced the government to acknowledge that a number of names may have needlessly been listed among the original 1,619 missing persons.

Late last year the remains of missing 16-year-old Greek Cypriot Zenon Zenonos were positively identified through DNA testing at a special facility set up to carry out the investigations.

The exhumations from two Nicosia cemeteries are being carried out by a team from the international organisation Physicians for Human Rights led by Dr William Haglund. Work on the remains is expected to be completed by autumn this year.

Zenonos was the second person from the Greek Cypriot missing list to be identified. The remains of another 16-year-old Greek Cypriot with US citizenship were recovered from a grave in the north by an American investigative team in 1998.

The government says that although it has evidence to conclude that 126 people from the list are dead, it believes that the Turkish side holds the key to the whereabouts of the remaining 1,491.

Saturday, April 22, 2000

[05] Savvides probing claims that Cypriot hospital waste ended up in Egypt

HEALTH Minister Frixos Savvides is looking into whether three containers full of hospital waste confiscated in Port Said came from Cyprus as alleged by an Egyptian court.

Reports out of Egypt yesterday said Egyptian prosecutors had ordered two men held for questioning about alleged imports of hospital waste from Cyprus.

They said customs men had seized three containers ostensibly full of waste paper for recycling in a paper factory northeast of Cairo.

Health and customs inspectors found they contained hospital waste, including used sanitary napkins, babies' nappies and X-ray negatives, not listed on the shipping manifest.

Prosecutors on Thursday ordered the detention for four days of Sherif Hassan Abdel-Khaleq, 50, head of the Tenth of Ramadan Group for Trade and Marketing, the company that imported the containers. They also ordered the detention of the company's customs agent in Port Said, Mohamed Neguib Haibah, 45.

The prosecutors say the import of hospital waste poses a danger to public health and contravenes environmental laws.

Savvides told the Cyprus Mail he was very surprised by the reports and said it was impossible for the waste to have come from Cypriot hospitals.

"We have incinerators in all of the hospitals," Savvides said. However, he was unsure of how the island’s numerous private clinics disposed of their waste.

"I can’t imagine any government paying to dump hospital waste," Savvides said adding he did not know of any particular private clinic large enough to justify three containers full of waste.

He said he fully intended to look into the reports from Egypt.

Health Committee members and Diko deputy Marios Matsakis was also puzzled. Although he had been campaigning over the state of the Nicosia General hospital’s incinerator some months ago, he said he could not see Cyprus exporting hospital waste to another country.

He also said that many of the larger private clinics had their own incinerators, but criticised some of the smaller ones, which he said often simply throw their waste on rubbish dumps.

Saturday, April 22, 2000

[06] Back in Cyprus to find her real mother

WHEN Susan Stuart was eight years old, she suffered a double shock. At the same time, she found out that her parents were splitting up and that she had been adopted from a Greek Cypriot mother.

Susan’s adopted mother Ali told her that her real name was Chrystalla and that her mother Maroulla Charalambous had changed her mind after signing the adoption papers when she was just five weeks old. When Maroulla saw her baby being pushed away in her pram in Famagusta, she burst into tears and begged Ali to return her.

Susan, or Chrystalla, is now 42. Back in Cyprus to try and track down her family, she told the Cyprus Mailhow she got hold of her Cypriot birth certificate when she turned 17 and was due to get her driving licence.

After years of searching and writing letters in a vain effort to track down her parents, she decided to come to Cyprus, where she is now with her husband and son, to try and find links that might lead her to her real mother from Famagusta. All she knows about her real father is that his name was Andrikos Stylianou.

The adoption agreement provided that her British adopted parents, John Stuart, a British Army officer, and his wife Ali, lived in Famagusta for two years before moving to the UK.

"When I became a mother, it became even more important for me and my family to track down my mother, to find my roots, so my children would also find their roots. My oldest son, who is now 19, was very upset when I told him I was adopted. He said to me: ‘We have to find your mother. We could have a whole family over there’."

Chrystalla came to Cyprus for the second time in six months on April 13 to stay until April 27 and try, through the Famagusta Club, to find people who could lead her to her real mother.

"I tried for years to track her down through the Cyprus High Commission, the British Red Cross, the Social and Welfare services in Cyprus, the Nicosia and Larnaca Courts and the British Armed Forces. However, nothing came out of it because the records were very old and my mother had a very common name," Chrystalla says.

"But the people at the Famagusta Club are very helpful and friendly and I feel that I fit it because they call me by my Cypriot name, Chrystalla, something which no one does in the UK. I have not found anything yet but I am hoping to follow up some leads to link me with my mother."

Chrystalla thinks about trying to get information from the Famagusta Hospital where she was born, but is afraid she might not be allowed to cross into the now Turkish-occupied city.

"It has not been easy on me all those years, living with my adopted mother who was so insecure about me returning to my real parents. She would not give me any information about my Greek Cypriot family, nor let me have any contacts with Cyprus. I wanted to have Greek books, to learn Greek, but my mother would not allow them in the house. She always made me feel so guilty for wanting to find my parents. In a way I hold that against her, because I would in no way want anything like this happening to my children," Chrystalla said.

"My adopted parents are now dead, but that is not the reason why I want to find my real parents. It was something I always needed to do. But at the age of eight I was too young to know what to do and where to look. My mother was quite old when she adopted me. She was 45, and unable to have children of her own, so I understand why she was so insecure to lose me, why she tried to wipe out my past. But she did not understand my point of view."

Chrystalla has no UK relatives with whom she is on speaking terms. As a child, she moved around from city to city with her family. Now she lives in Yorkshire with her husband, Roger Toft and her three sons, aged 19, 17 and 11. Her youngest son, Matthew, who is accompanying her to Cyprus, is very proud to be half Greek, she said, and is teaching himself the language.

Susan Toft, as she is known in England, is teaching animal care at a College of Higher Education in Yorkshire, where her husband also works as resource centre manager of the Arts and Music department.

"I know my real mother had good reasons to give me up; maybe she was too poor to raise me, maybe she had too many kids already, but I feel that she might wonder where I am and what I am doing, so I really want to find out whether she is alive and if so, then contact her."

Chrystalla also turned to the police for help, and is waiting to hear from them. She also has someone checking records at Larnaca district office for clues.

If you think you might know anything about Chrystalla's mother, please call the Cyprus Mail at 02 672074 or the CyBC at 02 421570 or 349932.

Saturday, April 22, 2000

[07] Nine in a house with no water or electricity

THE house at 5 Arsinois Street in Nicosia's Old City, where nine Pakistani students live, looks more like a stable than any human habitation.

It has no running water and no electricity. Its walls and floors are caked with years of fried-food grease and dirt. It is worse than a stable; it is a sty.

Its unflushable toilet has overflowed onto the floor. No water in the kitchen or the shower room next to it means no washing of humans, dishes or clothes.

Phivos, the man who collects the rent (and refused to give his surname to the Cyprus Mail) admitted: "I cut the water and I cut the electricity, too, because they owe £600 for the electricity and water and they don't want to pay."

Fortunately, all the students are Muslims, so they can shower at the main mosque, near the city's central vegetable market. But with no toilet, they say they also have to walk the half-mile or so to the mosque to relieve themselves.

The place has no chairs, sofas or benches; only beds or floor mattresses in the four of the eight rooms the students use. Bare light bulbs hang from ceiling cords, useless without power.

So the students use candles to read at night, but the way they have the candles mounted threatens to burn the building down. Heating or air conditioning are obviously unknown.

Three mattresses that have given up the ghost, and most of their stuffing, line the downstairs and upstairs hallways. The only other "furnishings" in the place are several dozen sacks of cement piled under the stairs leading to the upper floor.

The residents all say they are studying hotel management or business at CASA College in Nicosia, and showed college ID cards to prove it. Phivos denied this, claiming they were illegal workers.

Welfare Department Director Lula Theodorou told the Cyprus Mail that Phivos had claimed this to her, and that he told her he had reported the students to the immigration authorities. She warned they might now expect immigration troubles, even if they are bona fide students, thanks to Phivos' allegations.

The students claim they pay Phivos £50 a month per room - £40 for the room, and £10 for the water and electricity. They admit they have no written rental agreement, and no receipts.

"I don't have any rental agreement; it's oral," Phivos admitted. "It's £40 for rent... The £10 includes water and electricity. But if water and electricity come to more than that, they have to pay," he said.

The students showed the Cyprus Mail a £299.02 electricity bill for 5 Arsinois Street in the name of Neophytos Ioachim, aka Phivos, according to Nicosia Water Board Financial Manager Nicos Zambakides.

Zambakides said 5 Arsinois Street also has an unpaid water bill of £323.42.

The students said they paid their rent and utility fees, but apparently Phivos did not apply the money towards the water and power charges.

"Don't believe what they are saying," Phivos said, "because I've got a lot of trouble with these guys over there. The police is looking out for them all the time because they don't go to school and they are working."

He claimed the students had broken the oral agreement. "Instead of two persons" in a room, Phivos said sometimes "there were seven. They were coming from other houses where they don't have water and washing their clothes" (since the Old City has no water rationing).

But he could not explain the high electricity bill, since bare light bulbs in a few rooms and a small television are the only electrical devices in the residence, and one would have to run them non-stop for months to create such an unpaid balance.

Asked how the electricity bill could have gone unpaid for two months, and the water bill for four, Phivos said: "When the bill comes... they just take the bill and throw it away, so they won't have to give it to me to see." The students denied this.

The Electricity Authority (EAC) offered the only concrete help: it turned the power back on yesterday. But the students said that Phivos - who boasted impunity with 29 years of civil service behind him – had threatened to turn the power off again on Monday.

Zambakides said Nicosia Water Board regulations prohibited restoring water when a bill remained unpaid more than two months, and there was no way he could restore water with £323.47 unpaid.

Welfare Department Director Lula Theodorou could not help either. She suggested the Health Ministry might step in due to the health problem of the toilet, but they had closed at 2.30pm.

Besides, she said, to get student visas, the Pakistanis had to prove they could support themselves in Cyprus. Thus, since they have such funds, her agency could grant them welfare help.

Theodorou and lawyer Yiannakis Erotocritou both suggested the students simply move out of 5 Arsinois Street.

It might be a real-life object lesson in hotel management.

© Copyright Cyprus Mail 2000

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