FIFTY-two-year-old convicted Limassol bomber Andreas Onoufrios is on 24-hour suicide watch, following his recapture on Saturday after two weeks on the run from the authorities.
Onoufrios was placed in isolation on Sunday night when he was returned to the central prisons. He had been on the run since failing to return to jail after being given a 24-hour pass to get married on September 5. He was serving an 18-year sentence for the attempted murder of judge Michael Mavronicola in 1997, but was due for release in just over two years’ time on good behaviour.
Central prison authorities are afraid the convict could be in danger from himself and other prisoners, angry his escape has put an end to their privileges. Convicts had previously been allowed 24-hour passes after completing one third of their sentences as a way of rehabilitating them back into society before their eventual release.
“So far, he is eating and we have arranged for him to see a psychologist tomorrow (today),” a prison source told the Cyprus Mail yesterday. “The other prisoners looked at him with contempt and some even questioned how he had the audacity even to speak to them. It was thought best therefore to place him in isolation where we keep a 24-hour watch on his prison cell.”
Police, who launched an immediate search after his escape, initially feared Onoufrios had escaped to the occupied north and from there gone abroad.
But five days before Onoufrios’ arrest, police received information he was being helped by 29-year-old Yiannakis Spanos, a Greek serving in the National Guard on a five-year contract, said deputy chief of police operations, Soteris Charalambous.
During this time police also tightened security on series of possible targets involved in Onoufrios’ original trial, following a tip-off that the fugitive was in possession of a list of their names and had criminal intentions.
Spanos was placed under surveillance, and at around 10.20pm on Saturday, a team of 20 officers arrested Onoufrios during a covert operation as he tried to enter Spanos’ car in an open parking lot in Limassol’s Yermasoyia district. Both men were armed and Onoufrios was wearing a bulletproof jacket and a wig.
The escaped convict refused to co-operate with police and would not reveal where he had been staying over the past two weeks. On Sunday, however, police uncovered his flat where they found a list of telephone numbers belonging to the judges who had tried him, a British passport with a photograph missing and another photograph waiting to be placed in it, a number of wigs and an air-conditioner remote control, which appeared to have been modified into a detonator. Guns, explosives, bullets and firecrackers were also found during a police search of Spanos’ home.
Onoufrios was taken straight to jail on Sunday and Spanos was remanded in eight-day custody. The latter escaped being discharged from the National Guard three years ago when a court did not find enough evidence to convict him on charges of explosives possession. However, this time Defence Minister Kyriakos Mavronicolas said he no longer had “a place” in the National Guard.
Meanwhile, Onoufrios’ 75-year-old father, Manolis, congratulated police for arresting his son without any bloodshed, describing his son’s escape as “stupid” and saying he felt nothing but “exasperation and bitterness” over the entire ordeal.
He added: “He said he had been wronged and that he was in prison unjustly. He insisted he was innocent and I believe that if that were really true then I think that that is why he did it (escaped). I cannot know if his intentions were to commit a crime or not, because I haven’t been in touch with him yet so I don’t know his intentions.”
