THREE people, including a high ranking police officer, on trial in relation to a prostitution ring were acquitted yesterday because of what the judge called the “contemptuous” attitude of the witnesses and their unwillingness “to tell the truth.”
The defendants were the police migration department’s deputy commander Nicos Theodorou; Mingxia Hua, a Chinese woman known as ‘Nancy’; and Panayiotis Cosiaris, a pensioner who owned the flats where 46 Chinese immigrants were rounded up from the police during a raid on March 15 last year.
The defendants were facing a number of charges in relation to pimping, maintaining a house of prostitution, exploitation, abuse of power, corruption, indecent assault, bribery, money laundering, among others.
Charges were pressed after the police during a raid in March last year uncovered a prostitution ring thought to date back to 2008.
The prosecution based its case on the testimonies of seven Chinese women, thought to be victims of sexual exploitation, who were under police protection.
Three criminal court judges said that the case failed because two of the prosecution witnesses “came to court determined not to speak the truth and as a result were declared hostile witnesses while three others… took care to retract from their statements to a large extent anything incriminating the accused”.
During the trio’s remand hearings last year, a large number of allegations of sexual and psychological manipulation were made.
The court heard that pimped women were allegedly forced to have sex with the police officer who regularly visited the flats hosting the prostitution ring.
Some women were allegedly illegally admitted to Cyprus by the police officers or allegedly illicitly released from prison.
“You have to have sex with the very powerful policeman,” one woman was allegedly told while ‘Nancy’ told another that “problems can be taken care of”.
Another woman said she was told: “you’ll be a whore if you come to Cyprus”.
However, during the trial the witnesses retracted their testimonies.
Two witnesses said the police pushed them to give statements and “strongly conveyed the impression to court they were not willing to tell the truth,” the court said adding that their attitude was “contemptuous”.
“As a result the accused were either discharged or found innocent” of a number of charges and the defence’s request to drop the case in the remaining charges was accepted, the court said.
One witness said “prostitution issues were completely foreign to her.” Another one, “essentially refused to answer simple but key questions, basically using an illness as an excuse,” court said.
The court said that five of the witnesses came to court “as good wind-up little soldiers with the purpose of stripping their testimonies of anything incriminating”.
It added that “the only thing which emerges” through the testimonies of the witnesses is that in addition to the relationship they had with ‘Nancy,’ “everyone…had some kind of relationship” with Theodorou, the police officer.
He “was a regular visitor in the house they frequented and obviously for reasons that were irrelevant to his position as deputy commander of immigration police,” court said. Theodorou is currently suspended “until further notice,” police spokesman Andreas Angelides said. He said a disciplinary investigation against Theodorou was ongoing.
