AUTHORITIES ARE reportedly upbeat about getting closer to cracking solving a recent murder case that shocked the public with its cold-blooded immediacy.
On Tuesday, 11 On April 11, 43-year-old Giorgos Kyprou, aka Fantik, was shot at point-bank range by an unknown assailant on a motorcycle in the Strovolos suburb of Nicosia. The rider then fled the scene, with no one witnessing the crime.
Residents said they heard gunfire and after running out onto their balconies saw a man lying dead in his car.
Ballistics showed the murder weapon to be a 7.62mm assault rifle; and adding to the mystery, around 1.3kg of an explosives material was found in the trunk of the victim’s car.
Kyprou is also said to have owned a total of eight cellular phones, suggesting he was very safety- conscious and may have had reason to believe his life was in danger.
Police officers arriving on the scene said Kyprou’s face had been almost blown away by the gunfireimpact.
Two men, aged 55 and 57, have meanwhile been detained on suspicion of masterminding the crime. They had arranged to meet with Kyprou at a nearby kiosk, but the victim was shot dead died on his way there.
With little to go on, detectives had so far focused on the murder weapon and the hitman’s modus operandi, which resemble those the method used in the recent killings of Pambos Psaras and Kyriacos Kyriacou.
Psaras, a 40-year-old Nicosia betting shop owner, Pambos Psaraswas, gunned down while his car was stopped at traffic lights last July, and Kyriacos Kyriacou, 48, a Press and Information Office employee Kyriacou, 48, was shot dead two weeks later as he got out of his car to go to work.
Assuming the above cases are related, police believe they are dealing with a professional gunman who prefers to trail his victims and strikes whenever they are vulnerable. Another common thread is that there were no substantial eyewitnesses.
But now reports say detectives have in their possession a valuable clue: DNA traces of the man who pulled the trigger on Kyprou, and they hope to get a match from their records. The genetic material, which police have not specified, has been retrieved from shell casings.
This would indicate that the assassin either got careless or else was confident that authorities in the south did not have a file on him and therefore wouldn’t be able to track him down.
The latter possibility would fit the theory that the hitman was hired from the north, an assessment made in the wake of the murder.
Moreover, the explosives material found in Kyprou’s car is thought to have originated from the occupied areas, where it is typically used in quarrying. However, it is unknown whether the item belonged to the victim or was planted by someone else.
