POLICE said yesterday they were looking into claims by and 18-year-old man who says he was repeatedly beaten, verbally abused and mocked during police questioning because he was black.
Henry Taylor said he was the victim of racism and intimidation by people “who have the law in their hands”. The experience, he said, has left him terrorised and he can no longer look at police without feeling hatred.
The teen, who is originally from Zimbabwe but has lived in Cyprus with his mother and three sisters for eight years, said the incident occurred on March 10.
The Strovolos youth and his friends were sitting outside a local Lyceum at around 1.30pm when he got a phone call from police telling him he had 20 minutes to get to the police headquarters for questioning.
Henry and his best friend Marios Patsalos showed up at the station where he said ‘Z’ officers separated the pair.
The black teen was taken into a room where he was interrogated about a missing bike.
“They kept asking me where I’d hidden the bike. I told them I didn’t know what they were talking about,” he said.
Four or five months ago the 18-year-old had been caught riding a moped without road tax. He also had a problem with his licence. Until he could sort it out he had stopped using the vehicle and got around on a bicycle instead, he said.
That did not stop the officers who repeatedly punched him on the head and back and shoved him around the room, he said. The young man, who looks no more than a boy, tried to protect his head by putting his handcuffed wrists over it. With every blow he received, the metal handcuffs, which left marks on his wrists, dug into his head eventually causing him to bleed.
Henry said the officers then seized his phone and went through all his text messages and photographs.
“They were reading them out loud and laughing at me. Then they made me read one and it was a bit of a rude message and one of the officers got really angry and beat me round the head again,” he said.
His friend Marios and his cousin, who had also been at the Lyceum when Henry had received the phone call, tried telling police that their friend had been nowhere near a moped that day and had spent all morning with them. They were ignored.
Eventually Henry’s cousin called her father, a Greek Cypriot, to come to the police station.
“When they heard us threatening to go to the TV stations and how we called his uncle they all started to disappear. Then one of them tried to act all nice,” said Marios.
By the time Henry was released it was around 5pm. The police told him to wash his face and to use another bathroom “so that we don’t get a disease”. They then made him wipe his own blood from the cabinet where he’d hit his head.
When the young man’s uncle saw him, he asked if he’d been harmed in anyway. Despite the obvious cuts and bruises, Henry denied they’d touched him because he was afraid of what they’d do to him.
“They implied that I had to keep my mouth shut because they know where I live,” he said.
The teenager was later taken to Nicosia general hospital where he received first aid and was released. He still has back aches from the beating he received.
“I found out later it was another black kid they’d seen on a bike in Strovolos and they had been chasing him and he got away. They thought it was me and wanted me to confess. Every time I tried to speak or to tell the truth, they would hit me and punch me round the head,” he said.
Marios added: “They called him in because he’s black, as if he’s the only black kid in Strovolos.”
Henry said he had become used to racism growing up in Cyprus.
“It was really hard for me. To have the friends that I have now I went through a lot. Out of the 4,000 kids out of the schools I went to, I was only the black kid,” he said.
But his experience with the police was something different and “new that I will never forget”.
The 18-year-old said he didn’t believe that by speaking out it would benefit him.
He said: “I don’t think anyone cares. I don’t think the police care. I don’t think the court will care. I am doing this for ‘my’ people [other black people] because it’s not nice if this happens to them. When I was in there I thought I wasn’t going to come out alive. They were looking for someone to blame and I couldn’t even talk and tell them the truth. They were wearing guns and had pepper spray. I was beyond afraid.”
Immigrant support group KISA yesterday condemned the attack and called for a full investigation into the matter. It said those involved had to be punished and made an example of and that incidences of racial violence had to be recorded.
Police yesterday confirmed they would look into the attack. “He should have reported the incident at another police station though,” an officer said.
