POLICE said yesterday that forensic evidence taken from the white van believed to have been used to abduct 20-year-old Janka Kovacova from outside an Ayia Napa hotel over two weeks ago confirmed that the young woman had been inside the vehicle.
Speaking to the Cyprus Mail following a new remand hearing for two suspects arrested in connection with the Slovak’s disappearance, the lead investigator said the analysis of DNA evidence collected from a pair of women’s underwear and a hair found in the van after it was impounded proved they had belonged to Janka.
The same officer would not say how the 31-year-old Turkish Cypriot suspect, who was using the van on the night of Janka’s disappearance, explained the evidence.
Regarding the 33-year-old Bulgarian suspect, he said investigators were still in the process of determining whether or not he had been in van at the time of the young woman’s alleged abduction.
The men were arrested after an eyewitness saw a young woman, fitting Janka’s description, being pushed into a white van during the early hours of August 17. The vehicle description the woman gave to police matched the Turkish Cypriot’s van.
Under questioning, the 31-year-old, who lives in Nicosia district village Potamia with his parents, said the company he worked for had sent him to Ayia Napa to pick up packaging boxes. He claims he went down to the seaside resort at around 3am and after picking up the boxes returned straight home. He also said he had gone to Ayia Napa with the 33-year-old Bulgarian. The latter denies the claims and said he was nowhere near Ayia Napa that night, police said.
A Paralimni court yesterday re-remanded both men for eight days.
Janka went missing at around 3.30am on August 17. She was last heard of by a male colleague whom she called, saying, “Come. Somebody with a white car and a black T-shirt…” before the call was abruptly broken off.
She and the colleague had that evening been out for drinks at a local bar after she finished her shift at the Grecian Bay hotel where she and three other school friends had been employed since June. The colleague dropped her off outside the hotel’s main entrance at around 2.45am because she had to be up early for her 7am waitressing shift.
Forty minutes later, she made the call to her colleague asking for help, but by the time he returned she had disappeared.
Police, family and friends have been unable to determine what Janka could have been doing between the time she was dropped off at the hotel and the time she made the frightened call.
The missing girl’s aunt is currently in Cyprus to help with the investigation and has appealed to anyone with any information on her niece’s disappearance to contact either the police or the Slovak Embassy.
Her three friends returned to Slovakia yesterday at their parents’ urging, cutting short their working holiday by two months.
