TWO senior Drug Squad officers yesterday spent hours giving statements to criminal investigators regarding the events surrounding the escape of convicted rapist and murderer Antonis Prokopiou Kitas, alias Al Capone.
Drug Law Enforcement Unit deputy commander Avraam Charalambous and Sergeant Yiannos Yiannakou were questioned by two teams of criminal investigators at Ayios Dhometios and Omorfita police stations, respectively. They were fingered by Kitas as his accomplices in a plan gone bad to arrest a Turkish Cypriot drugs baron.
The duo’s eight-day remand expires today. Whether they will be re-remanded was not yesterday clear.
Meanwhile Justice Minister Loucas Louca said the police who had shot at Kitas during the Stassicratous Street incident would be offered protection if necessary.
He was referring to reports that the 42-year-old lifer had perhaps obtained the list of names of officers involved in the December 12 shooting from his accomplice Ioannis Menikou.
The latter, who is due to stand trial next month for aiding and abetting Kitas in his escape, is thought to have had access to the affidavits through his lawyer after he was formally charged.
“I don’t have the outcome of the investigation conducted by the Central Prisons’ warden if the affidavits ended up in any convict’s hands,” said Louca.
He added that he did not know if Kitas knew the officers’ names or not.
Police Chief Iacovos Papacostas refrained on commenting about if and how Kitas had managed to get his hands on the affidavits regarding the Stassicratous incident as the matter was being handled by the criminal investigators.
When reporters pointed out that on Wednesday the criminal investigators had said it was not their business how the affidavits had wound up in Kitas’ hands, Papacostas said: “Let other people respond to that. We have nothing to do with the questionings.”
House Legal Affairs Committee Chairman Ionas Nicolaou also said if reports that Kitas knew what was in the police’s affidavits were true, it would have a detrimental effect on the public’s already waning opinion in police.
“It will be a very big mistake that raises a lot of questions,” he said.
Nicolaou said certain people should be called to answer how this had happened when it risked jeopardising the validity of a crucial witness’s statement “however unreliable his testimony might be deemed”.
“If the information is untrue then the matter is still very serious,” he said, explaining that the outrage the rumour had provoked was an orchestrated mechanism of misinformation and propaganda designed to influence public opinion.
“The competent authorities, the Attorney-general and criminal investigators must move to put a stop to this so that the criminal investigators can do their job the way they should without leaks that could jeopardise the case,” he said.
Nicolaou questioned why it had been necessary to prosecute Kitas’ two accomplices at this stage as it had forced the prosecution to give the pair’s lawyers access to the witnesses statements and thus risking the information from leaking.
“They could have waited for the completion of all the questioning before the two defendants were charged in court,” he said.
