Medium jailed for two months

A MEDIUM was yesterday jailed for two months after pleading guilty to seven counts of committing sorcery in exchange for a fee.

Guinean national Toura Gassama, 52, was arrested last week in a sting operation after he offered to tell an undercover policewoman’s fortune in exchange for £50.

According to investigators, Gassama, who also holds Dutch and Senegalese passports, had in the past charged several people from Nicosia £50 to read their fortunes.

Most of his clients were men and women wanting their partners, who had recently left them, to come back.

According to some of the charges, Gassama had demanded thousands of pounds from his punters so that he could use his powers of magic to make their problems go away.

The maximum sentence for practicing sorcery for a fee is one year in prison.

Gassama had initially pleaded not guilty to six of the charges against him because he claimed he couldn’t remember the people he had charged.

He later retracted his not guilty plea and was yesterday jailed for two months by Judge Alexandros Panayiotou.

On August 7, a female undercover police officer went to the apartment he was staying at and told him that she wanted him to use his magic because she was having problems at home with her husband.

He agreed and told her to write down her details, such as her phone number, name and address on a notebook.

Gassama then used another notebook and began scribbling lines.

He then told her to write her husband’s details in yet another notebook before telling her that her husband was having affairs with other women.

Meanwhile, the trial of female medium Vera Giorgiou is set to start in September.

Giorgiou is accused of raking in over £400,000 from punters after claiming that somebody had cursed them with cancer and that she needed the money to rid them of the spells.