The Attorney General of Cyprus has launched an investigation into the way police handled the process that eventually led to the conviction of an army officer for the murder of seven foreign nationals, two of whom were young children of the adult victims.
Attorney General Costas Clerides said in a statement, reported by Associated Press, that he had launched the investigation after examining an Independent Police Complaints Authority report into how police had investigated the country’s first case involving a serial killer, army captain Nicholas Metaxas.
Mr Clerides said 15 members of the police may have breached the law or had been negligent in their conduct of the case.
The Police Complaints Authority report, he said, had found that that some officers had acted in ways beyond “mere oversights” and which had “constituted the basis” for establishing that a criminal offence had been committed.
At the time of the investigations, police were accused of not taking seriously missing persons’ reports concerning the eventual victims. Three of the victims were women from the Philippines with another victim being the daughter of one of the murdered women. A Nepalese woman along with a Romanian woman and her daughter were the other victims.
READ MORE: Cyprus serial killer sentenced to seven life terms for murdering foreign women
Metaxas was sentenced in June 2019 to seven consecutive life terms after he pleaded guilty to charges of premeditated murder and kidnapping over a two-and-a -half year period, between September 2016 and April 2019.
Metaxas, 35, the divorced father of two, confessed to the killings in a 10 page hand-written letter, after initially refusing to cooperate with the police.
The case gained notoriety in April 2019 after the decomposing body of Mary Rose Tilburcio, 38, from the Philippines was found by chance in the flooded shaft of an abandoned copper mine.
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