CONVICTED rapist and murderer Antonis Prokopiou Kitas, his brother, and an Indian national were yesterday found guilty of stealing the remains of former President Tassos Papadopoulos in December 2009.
Kitas, alias Al Capone, his brother Mamas Kitas and Sarbjit Singh were found guilty of conspiracy to commit a misdemeanour, illegal entry to a burial ground and exhuming a body without a court order. Sentencing will be handed down on April 18. All of the charges are classed as misdemeanours and carry sentences of up to three years. It is expected the trio will be sentenced to between six and 18 months, making it likely two of them will be sentenced to time served. Kitas, the mastermind of the plot is already serving life for the murder of two women in 1993.
The court dismissed the more serious charge of blackmail and extortion, which were brought against the trio, saying the charges could not be established without reasonable doubt.
Police investigators had testified that no money ever changed hands.
Singh had been accused of trying to extort €100,000 from Papadopoulos’ daughter between March 1-8, 2010 by saying he would reveal the location where the former president had been reburied by him and Mamas Kitas.
But eventually he gave the location unconditionally and the former president’s remains were recovered five kilometres from his gravesite in Kato Deftera.
The court ruled that “the defendants, in early December 2009 in Nicosia, conspired together to commit acts of desecration, unlawful entry to a place of burial exhumation of remains without a court order,” the judgement said.
“The defendants, having entered the Ayios Nicholas cemetery, where Tassos Papadopoulos was buried, desecrated his grave, removed the tombstone and then dug up his body perfectly aware of the effect this would have on his family,” it added.
The trio also insulted the memory of a former president by moving his body, the court said.
As for the motive of ‘mastermind’ Antonis Kitas, the court said that based on testimonies and evidence, it found that the lifer had asked his brother, Mamas to steal the body in the hope of negotiating a shorter prison if his plan had worked and he came out the hero of the piece by helping the authorities track down the remains.
When suspicion first fell on him, Kitas had publicly denied he was “moral instigator” of the theft in a handwritten letter to Sigma TV last year. “I apologise to the Cypriot people for the insult to the memory of their leader, Tassos Papadopoulos,” the March 18, 2010, letter concluded.
The case got complicated when in March last year Kitas implicated two other men who were under investigation for the December 2009 attempted murder of the Gregoriou brothers from Tseri on Christmas Day that year, nearly two weeks after the body snatch.
One of the brothers, Andreas Gregoriou, who was injured in the bomb blast is himself currently on trial in the high-profile murder of media owner Andis Hadjicostis.
The plot thickened even further last October when more connections were made with the Hadjicostis trial. Theophanis Hadjigeorgiou, a main witness in both trials, implicated a witness in the Hadjiciostis trial – a man named Giorgos Zavrantonas.
A police inspector was also implicated in the body theft by Kitas in September. At the time the double murderer said he was willing “to be injected with truth serum” to prove he wasn’t lying.
Kitas was dragged out of courtroom a month ago just before the trial reached a conclusion. He was insisting he speak to the court’s president claiming he had “new evidence”.
Papadopoulos’ body was stolen from his grave at Kato Deftera cemetery on the eve of the first anniversary of his death. It was discovered the following March at a Strovolos cemetery after Singh had phoned the family asking for money.
The body snatchers shifted a 250kg granite slab and dug through several feet of earth in a stormy night and dug up the grave without using any mechanical equipment. The theft was widely reported internationally. Police, believing the body could have been taken abroad, had requested help with their investigations from the Scotland Yard, FBI, Interpol and Greek and Israeli police.
