JUST SHY of a year after a man was murdered, police showed up in his home with a court writ relating to an assault charge, stunning his mother who could not understand why they were looking for a man whose murder they were meant to be investigating.
Lawyer Demetris Pavlides said the tearful mother showed up in his office this week, distraught that authorities wanted to charge her son in a 2009 assault case that she thought had closed prior to his death in February last year.
Her son, 22-year-old Andreas Papadopoulos, was shot dead and found in his car’s passenger seat in the early hours of February 4, 2012 after a member of the public found his parked car outside a house on the outskirts of Nicosia. The head of Nicosia police headquarters Kypros Michaelides said at the time that “the specific person” (Papadopoulos) was known to the police.
Papadopoulos was already in the system relation to a police investigation on the 2009 assault of a special forces’ conscript. Papadopoulos, along with two others, faced assault charges but the state’s legal services had suspended prosecution before Papadopoulos’ murder, Pavlides said.
“Obviously they had since received new evidence and decided to re-open the case but how could the police, the legal services, the prosecutors, not know that he [Papadopoulos} was dead?”
The police ought to have pulled up Papadopoulos’ file, which should have shown he was murdered, Pavlides said. “Don’t they have lists, don’t they have computers?”
“How many people get murdered each year, anyway? Is it possible that the police did not know?”
The latest death statistics available to the Cyprus Mail show that four people were murdered in 2010, 17 in 2009 and nine in 2008.
At any rate, what seems to be the case is that whoever drew up the indictment papers was not aware of the murder case, though exactly how that came to be will be subject to investigation, police spokesman Andreas Angelides said yesterday.
But asked how it was even possible to charge a dead man, Angelides said that the police archives are not connected with other services.
“We are looking into computerising data bases – both within the force and with external services – so that this does not take place again, resulting in the creation of a negative image,” Angelides said.
It was not clear yesterday how the police could have filed indictment papers without first pulling out the man’s file, which should have shown he was murdered.
Angelides said that the investigation would show how the blunder came about.
The police does not have computerised access to warrants issued by the courts, and auditor general Chrystalla Georghadji said in her 2011 report that police would often go looking for people at the wrong address.
And there are difficulties implementing already digitised systems within the police, Georghadji said. She said that although the force’s warehouses obtained a computerised system in 2006, only three from the police force’s 26 departments had fully digitised their entries and some departments were still in early stages.
In general across state services, even computerised services are not fully functional, Georghadji said.
