Police accused of racism in remand request

A DEFENCE lawyer representing a Sri Lankan housemaid yesterday accused police investigators of showing racial bias in their remand request for his client.

The lawyer, Pavlos Erotokritou, told Judge Angelos David that he not only found police’s request for an eight-day remand for his client “exaggerated” but also “absurd”.

Erotokritou told the judge his client had told him the police had beaten her during questioning.

The Sri Lankan housemaid was arrested on September 26 after her employer, Fani Tsourouli, told police that she believed she had stolen jewellery from her dressing table, including a gold watch, a diamond ring, a gold ring and a pair of gold earrings, worth a total of around £2,000.

Investigators went to the maid’s apartment, where they found some of Tsourouli’s jewellery.

Police investigator Stavroulla Andreou requested a remand of eight days from the judge, because “a total of 25 statements need to be taken from her friends and family with the use of an interpreter. We will also need to check with her former employers to see if they had perhaps fallen victims to theft, while also trying to locate some other items of jewellery still reported missing by the plaintiff.”

But Erotokritou told the judge, “Your honour, I doubt very much that the police would have requested a remand of eight days had my client been Cypriot and not Sri Lankan. The police already have the evidence in their possession, so what’s all this nonsense about needing a further eight days. Eight days for what? The defence requests a remand period of two days.”

Agreeing that the eight days “are indeed too much”, Judge David ruled that the suspect appeared strongly linked to the case against her and that a remand period of six days would suffice for preliminary police investigations.

When told about the allegations of police brutality against his client, the judge informed Erotokritou that it was up to his client to request to see a doctor if she was being mistreated or to file a complaint against the police.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.