By Peter Stevenson
INVESTIGATIONS continued on Monday into the death of a 40-year-old Romanian woman whose body was found in her flat last week with authorities following a number of leads as they search for the father of her five-year-old son.
Ildiko Gergely Tunde, 40, was found dead in squalid conditions in her apartment after her young son had been seen calling for help in the building’s hallway early on Thursday.
“Police investigations are continuing as far as the circumstances of the woman’s death are concerned and we have taken a number of statements. Once our investigations are complete, the file will be sent to the coroner who will release the findings,” police spokesman Andreas Angelides said.
It was revealed on Monday that Tunde’s relatives had been located in Romania by consular services of the foreign ministry. Discussions are taking place to decide whether Tunde’s body will be flown to Romania for burial or whether it will be buried in Cyprus.
Her son is currently under the supervision of welfare services, where he was placed last Thursday.
Asked to comment on the child’s biological father, Angelides said it is a very sensitive subject which is being handled by welfare services.
Angelides said police were expecting to receive the woman’s file from the interior ministry later on Monday and they would look into claims she was going to be deported for entering into a marriage of convenience.
“If that is the case, any orders to remand or deport her would be issued by the migration officer. We need to see what is in her file and what actions had been taken by the relevant departments,” Angelides said.
News reports said a 65-year-old businessman from Larnaca made a statement to police that Tunde had worked for him and had been intimate with him but that she had also been intimate with other men. But according to daily Phileleftheros the five-year-old’s father is Romanian and his name was included in a statement Tunde had previously made to police.
Sources said that a 22-year-old Romanian man who is currently serving time at the central prisons for burglary and claims to be her son from a previous marriage in Romania told police that his mother had left their homeland when he was three years old.
He told police that he had come to Cyprus in 2010 and through his father had located his mother. Tunde had told him that she’d had a baby boy following a relationship with a local businessman who had denied being the father of the child.
Meanwhile the headmistress of the kindergarten the young boy had been attending since September said that the boy’s appearance did not indicate that he and his mother were living in squalid conditions. Firemen had to wear masks and climb through piles of rubbish in a filthy flat to reach Tunde’s body.
“He was a happy child, clean, who behaved normally and came to school every day with a packed lunch and had no problems,” said the headmistress.
His mother would bring him to school every morning and pick him up in the afternoon and the headmistress said that if she had spotted anything untoward the school would have taken the necessary measures to report it.
“We did not notice anything and nothing made us suspicious that there were problems.”
State pathologists Nicholas Charalambous and Sophocles Sophocleous confirmed the cause of death to be an infection of the gastrointestinal tract caused by duodenal perforation for which the woman had refused treatment last week at Larnaca GeneralHospital.
