Row over dog ends in tragedy

A 63-year-old Dhali bar owner was yesterday arrested on suspicion of killing a Polish man apparently after an argument over the victim’s dog.
Witnesses said 27-year-old Sebastian Duleba got into an argument with the owner, Antonis Loizou, at around 1.30 am after he took his dog into the Kingdom bar in Dali.
The victim left the bar a while later but apparently returned some four hours later and got into another argument with Loizou in the street near the bar.
Duleba had parked his car in such a way that it left the older man blocked in.
“There was a Cypriot asking a foreign man to leave,” said nearby resident Andreas Koshis who heard the heated argument. “He was angrily asking him to go home but the foreigner remained in the middle of the street for some reason.”
Koshis said he heard Duleba shouting names in Polish. “I thought he was calling his friends to get out of the car but it was the dog he was calling.”
Koshis said he went downstairs to the street when everything went quiet and saw the man lying on the tarmac.
“I thought he was unconscious,” Koshis told reporters.
Other residents said they could hear shouting, which lasted several minutes.
The Pole was found lying on the tarmac with the suspect gone.
He later turned up at the Pera Horio Nisou police station where he told officers he had hit a man with his hands and left him lying unconscious on Boumboulinas Street.
But state pathologist Nicolas Charalambous found that the victim had wounds on the head and throat caused by a sharp instrument.
“It looks like he has suffered blows from an as yet unknown object,” Nicosia district police chief Kypros Michaelides said.
But the suspect denies hitting Duleba using an object.
One resident said the suspect was always known to have a short fuse.
“But we were surprised because he did not seem like a man who would do such a thing,” the resident said.
“In his good days he is a perfect man,” another resident who knows the suspect told the Sunday Mail.
“He doesn’t stand for any nonsense but I wouldn’t have thought he was a violent person. Not in that sense,” said the man who did not wish to be named.
The bar has been around for many years and has changed hands several times.
The suspect was expected to be brought before the Nicosia district court later last night for a remand hearing.

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