By Evie Andreou
Police confirmed on Thursday they were looking to see if the suspects in the Strovolos double murder were also linked with a similar murder of a 77-year-old man in 2013, also in Nicosia.
According to a police spokesman, the investigators of the murder of Giorgos Hadjigeorgiou, 60, and his wife, Dina Sergiou, 59, who were stabbed to death in their Strovolos home two weeks ago, are looking into a possible link with a similar case, that of the murder of 77-year-old Georgios Stavrou in June 2013. Stavrou had been found alive in the freezer of his Aglandjia butcher shop with 25 stab wounds to his head and stomach and died in the ambulance on his way to Nicosia general hospital.
The case remains open, police said. “Murder cases that are not resolved remain open,” deputy police spokesman Stelios Stylianou said.
He added that due to the nature of that crime, investigators are looking into whether the two cases are connected.
It was believed at the time that it could be a hate crime due to the number of stab wounds, but a bag with around €1,000 was missing. The victim had €150 in his pocket, which wasn’t taken. Neither was a small amount of cash in the till.
After initial investigations, police said they believed the assailant may had been watching the victim for some time to determine his working habits and struck at an early hour to ensure there would be no witnesses as the shop was located on a main road in Aglandjia. They believed the attacker or attackers knew Stavrou carried a bag with a large amount of money in it.
Blood from the scene was cleaned up and with it, much of the evidence by relatives of the butcher, believing that Stavrou had had an accident – before he was examined by doctors and established that he had been stabbed multiple times. The case remained unsolved.
Hadjigeorgiou and his wife were found stabbed to death in their home. Hadjigeorgiou was stabbed between 25 to 30 times and his wife 10 times. They both had one defensive wound each on their right arms, a post-mortem revealed.
A suspect in the couple’s murder, a 33-year-old man who was arrested last week, said that what happened had been planned for the past five years. Inside the car he was driving, officers found two notebooks in which the suspect wrote all the facts relating to the case. He said he had known the house since 2012 when he did some work on the windows.
The authorities were alerted after the couple’s 15-year-old son went to a neighbouring house saying his parents had been murdered and that he had been locked in the basement but managed to escape. Three more suspects were arrested and remanded in custody in connection with the same case.
