Three witness testified at Limassol court on Tuesday in the trial of a man charged with the triple murder last November of two brothers and their friend.
Christakis Thoma is being tried for the killings of siblings Paraschos, 19, and Constantinos Ntorzi, 21, as well as their friend Emilios Miltiadous, 24, who were all fatally stabbed with a knife.
Security in and around the courts was tight. Thoma, who arrived wearing a bullet-proof jacket, was accompanied into the courtroom by eight policemen. All those observing the proceedings had their identities noted and were subject to checks using a scanning machine.
The first witness was the 33-year-old fiancée of Paraschos Ntorzi, with whom he had a now four-year-old son.
According to her statement, the accused, who she had never met, sent her a Facebook friend request which she did not see but was informed about by her fiancée, who replied to it with her permission.
The woman told the court that Constantinos Ntorzi then made a call to Thoma in which she heard him ask the accused if he was not “ashamed of himself for sending messages to his brother’s wife.”
She said that in a discussion that ensued between the brothers, Constantinos told Paraschos what was said in his conversation with Thoma, including the suspect saying he had been with “many women and why not with her”.
It was at this point the brothers contacted the third victim before making their way to the Lokatsis kebab restaurant in Heroes square where Thoma worked.
The second witness to take the stand was a Greek woman in the square at the time of the killings, who told the court that she saw two men being chased by a third wielding a kitchen knife.
The third witness to take the stand was a man who attended the same gym as the suspect. He told the court Thoma had punched him because he had liked a picture of Thoma’s girlfriend on Facebook.
Thoma denies the premeditated murder of the three youths on the night of November 24, 2015, after which he fled the scene. He was arrested two days later.
He maintains everything started when he broke up with a girlfriend who had persuaded the Ntorzi brothers to phone and continually harass him and one of his two children.
In Thoma’s version of events, the three victims arrived and began cursing him outside the restaurant with him saying he had asked them to sit down and accept his hospitality. He told the court at an earlier hearing that he lost his temper when they continued to swear at him and his children, grabbing a knife to intimidate them, at which point they began throwing chairs at him.
He said this led to him chasing the men, with his father in tow, yelling at him to stop. Not realising they were dead after stabbing them in the street, he returned to the restaurant and continued work until finding out from the internet that the three had died.
