TWO women and a man were yesterday remanded in custody for eight days after they were found in possession of almost a kilo of heroin, police said.
The trio had purchased 800g of the Class A drug for €13,000 from a Turkish Cypriot man in Kyrenia on Tuesday morning. The drugs were then divided into two plastic bags and smuggled across the Ledra Palace checkpoint in the underwear of one of the 46-year-old women.
The three were stopped and searched when they returned to their parked car on Markou Drakou Street in Nicosia. The Drug Squad had received a tip off about the drugs’ arrival to the free areas and had placed the checkpoint under surveillance.
The sum of €1,240 in cash was also found on the 46-year-old as was €3,940 found on the 29-year-old man. A later search of the 40-year-old woman’s Larnaca district home uncovered €12,400.
Commenting on the bust, Drug Squad Assistant Commander Avraam Charalambous said the occupied areas were Cyprus’ main source of heroin.
“The occupied areas are the largest market [for heroin],” he said. “We often carry out checks along the [Green] line… In this case we had information of a drug movement.”
Charalambous said this was the largest heroin bust from the occupied areas to date.
According to police, the 46-year-old woman allegedly said she had already been to the occupied areas three times this year to transport drugs back to the free areas. She claimed she used to deliver the drugs to the 40-year-old woman who was with her at the time of Tuesday’s bust. The latter has pleaded complete ignorance regarding the older woman’s accusations.
The 46-year-old said she and the 40-year-old, as well as a 29-year-old man and an 11-year-old girl, who is the daughter of one of the two women, crossed over to the occupied areas on Tuesday specifically to purchase the heroin. The two women met with a Turkish Cypriot man who took them to Kyrenia where they met with a second man. The 46-year-old said she then paid the second Turkish Cypriot €13,000, which she’d been given to by the 29-year-old husband of the 40-year-old woman in exchange for the 800g of heroin. The two women then returned to occupied Nicosia, where they met up with the man and child at around noon and crossed back over from the Ledra Palace.
Congratulating the Drug Squad on its recent success, Justice Minister Kypros Chrysostomides said he hoped that the problem regarding drugs from the north would be solved with a solution to the Cyprus problem.
Meanwhile Charalambous added that the Drug Squad was as united as ever and that it had no quarrel with the country’s political leadership.
“We are on the right track and there are no problems. None at all… We will succeed in our aim to hit out at traffickers,” he said.
Charalambous was referring to last month’s rift between the Drug Squad and legal services, which threatened the former’s dissolution. The Drug Squad threatened to put in transfer requests en masse after a Nicosia district judge allowed four major drug suspects to post bail. The decision prompted an appeal from the Attorney-general, which saw two of the suspects, Lucas Siderenou and Costas Constantinou, back behind bars in less than a week.
Siderenou was caught red-handed transporting 189 kilos of cannabis and 12 kilos of cocaine in the back of a truck on March 27.
