Police: Body of Cyprus president stolen from grave

[December 11, 2009]  NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) -- Grave robbers have dug up the coffin of former Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos and stolen his corpse, police said Friday.

Mounds of fresh earth lay at the site of the robbery in the Deftera village cemetery in a southwestern suburb of the Cypriot capital, Nicosia. Police investigators cordoned off the area and were searching the site. The motive was unclear.

Saturday is the first anniversary of the death of Papadopoulos, who was Cyprus' president from 2003 to 2008.

"The grave of the former president has been violated and the body robbed," said police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos.

Investigators believe the body was taken either late Thursday night or early Friday morning. The motive is unclear. Grave-robbing is rare in Cyprus.

"What happened is macabre and utterly condemnable. I am honestly still trying to comprehend what kind of warped minds could even think of doing such a thing, let alone actually carry it out. This is a perverse act that will sicken society in Cyprus," said the head of Cyprus' ruling AKEL party, Andros Kyprianou.

"It is my hope that those responsible will be caught and made an example of. Society needs to remain calm," he added.

Kypros Chrysostomides, who served as justice minister under Papadopoulos, also expressed outrage.

"I totally condemn, with all my soul, this barbarous act of sacrilege," he said. "I cannot understand why somebody would want to do such a thing. ... Such barbarous acts only do damage to Cyprus."

Papadopoulos, a hardline president who ushered the ethnically divided island into the European Union after rallying Greek Cypriots to reject a United Nations-brokered peace deal, died a year ago on Saturday from lung cancer at age 74. He served as president from 2003 until March 2008, when he lost the presidential election to current President Demetris Christofias.

A British-trained lawyer, Papadopoulos was a veteran of Cyprus politics whose career spanned most of the island's turbulent history since gaining independence from British colonial rule in 1960.

He was a leader of the Greek Cypriot guerrilla group EOKA, which waged an anti-colonial campaign, and served as the youngest cabinet minister in the island's first post-independence government, at the age of 26.

Papadopoulos was for a time the chief Greek Cypriot negotiator in settlement talks with the breakaway Turkish Cypriots after 1974, when Turkey invaded the island in response to a coup by supporters of uniting the island with Greece.

The former president is probably best remembered for an emotional televised appeal to Greek Cypriots to reject a reunification plan brokered by then U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which he vilified as entrenching the island's division rather than ending it.

Three quarters of Cypriots obliged him in an April 2004 referendum. Two-thirds of Turkish Cypriots accepted the plan.

[Associated Press; By JOHN LEONIDOU]

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