A suitcase was brought up from the Mitsero red lake on Sunday afternoon, containing a badly-decomposed body, police spokesman Andreas Angelides said.
It was not immediately clear whether it was a woman or a child. Angelides said further examination would take place at the morgue as the body was “not identifiable”.
Fire Chief Marcos Trangolas was also hesitant to make a definitive statement, telling reporters at the scene that “a suitcase was retrieved in which there was a body”.
Information began to leak out shortly afterwards that the body was fully clothed and was likely that of a child. The Cyprus News Agency reported that their information suggested it was.
According to the suspect’s alleged confession, he threw three of his seven victims in the red lake; Romanian mother and daughter Livia Florentina Bunea, 36 and Elena Natalia, 8, who disappeared on September 30, 2016, and 30-year-old Maricar Valdez Arquila from the Philippines who went missing in December 2017.
The search for the third suitcase will resume on Monday at 8.30am.
The first suitcase containing the remains of a woman, also fully-clothed, was brought up last Sunday, April 28, from the red lake. She has not yet been positively identified. Three of the other bodies found, two in a mine shaft at Mitsero and one near the Orounta firing rage, had been naked and bound.
The second suitcase was brought out of the lake at the abandoned mine between 3.30pm and 4pm on Sunday after a week of surveys using a robotic camera and later in the week, sonar technology, to pinpoint areas of interest in the toxic water.
In the early afternoon, a diver entered the lake at one of the marked spots and placed a net around the suitcase so it could be brought ashore intact.
Trangolas said that on Saturday the sonar had swept all over the lake. “At five o’clock this morning we had the results. The sonar’s analyst and operator suggested some points of reference, giving us a priority. Using the robotic camera, those points were approached, the object was spotted, it was marked, and then the diver pulled out the object,” he said.
Five bodies from seven have now been recovered. Two other victims remain unaccounted for. If the bodies recovered from the red lake turn out to be Livia and her daughter Elena Natalia, the remaining two victims to be found will be Maricar Valdez Arquila, and Sierra aged six, the daughter of Mary Rose Tiburco, 39, also from the Philippines. The suspect allegedly told police he threw Sierra’s body in Memi lake in Xyliatos but daily searches have not yet found any trace of her.
It was the discovery of Mary Rose’s body by a tourist at the mine shaft on April 14 that kicked off the investigation into what turned into a case of serial killings. Six days after Mary Rose was found, a second body was retrieved from the mine, that of Arian Palanas Lozano, 28 from the Philippines who went missing on July 21, 2018. She was only positively identified on Friday. The body of a woman believed to be Nepalese, Asmita Khadka Bista was found at Orounta on April 25. She had not been reported missing to police but the suspect allegedly told them he had killed her in the summer of 2018. According to police he met the victims on social media site Badoo.
Two investigations have been launched into possible police missteps in investigating the women’s cases when they were first reported missing. Justice Minister Ionas Nicolaou was pressured to resign and did so on Thursday while Police Chief Zacharias Chrysostomou was given the sack by President Nicos Anastasiades on Friday.
On Sunday a protest took place in Limassol with a march starting at 2pm from GSO Molos to the centre of the town. Organisers said it was a memorial march against racism “for the victims of our indifference.” The march aimed at demonstrating public outrage and disbelief in the state “that let those women in despair.”
Later Sunday afternoon another event was held near the mine organised by the Mitsero community and attended by local residents and others.
The suspect, army officer and erstwhile professional photographer, Nicos Metaxas, was remanded for a further eight days on Sunday by the Nicosia court where police introduced a new investigation into the alleged rape by the suspect of a Filipino woman aged 19 in early 2017.
