Rapist fears put women on edge

POLICE yesterday told the Cyprus Mail they were receiving a flood of panicked calls from Nicosia women worried that they were being followed or watched by the suspected serial rapist.

One official of the Nicosia police said: “We are getting so many reports from jumpy women, with some telling us that they hear footsteps behind them as they walk home and others complaining that they see shadows moving outside their homes late at night.”
The official pointed out that there was still no evidence that a serial rapist was on the loose in Nicosia and that people should not be panicking like this.

The official did admit that police were on the lookout for a suspect in connection with a previous rape.

“I think it is important for people to stay calm and to understand that investigations have not proven that we are indeed talking about a serial rapist. As far as we know, there has been one rape and one attempted rape. The rest have been thefts by people in hoods but for some reason people are connecting all these various crimes together to make them appear like it is one man. That is not necessarily the case and it could very well be different people.”

In the early hours of yesterday morning, police in Nicosia answered a call from a young woman who told them that at around 2.15am she saw a hooded man waiting in her garden as she was entering her house. She told police that the man ran off as soon as he saw her.
A police announcement stated that there was no connection between last night’s incident and the suspected rapist.

In December, a 21-year-old woman from Nicosia who was getting out of her car, parked some 100 metres from her apartment, when a hooded man suddenly jumped up from behind her, forced a handkerchief over her mouth to stop her from screaming and pushed her into his car where he tied her up before driving her to an isolated spot and raping her.
Police have described the suspect as a young man, aged around 30 and possibly of foreign origin.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.