A WOMAN police officer who questioned the wife of a murdered man yesterday told the Nicosia Assizes Court that the suspect’s demeanour showed that she knew her husband was dead even before it was official.
Phedra Antoniou testified in the trial of 32-year-old Bank employee Magda Eleftheriou, her Pakistani lover Zeeshan Asghar, 22, and his Chinese roommate Yu Hong Bo, 28, charged with the premeditated murder of Pavlos Christodoulou on July 17 last year.
The 38-year-old contractor had been bludgeoned to death before being burnt in the boot of his car.
A trial within a trial is under way to determine the admissibility of a statement made by Magda in which she said she knew the other two were going to injure her husband in order to cancel a family trip to England.
CID sergeant Antoniou, who spent many hours with Magda, testified that the defendant was calm on the morning of July 18, when she was questioned at her home.
Antoniou said that she knew Christodoulou was dead at the time, but she did not tell Magda, who nevertheless behaved as if she knew.
“I understood from her behaviour and words that she knew he was dead,” Antoniou said.
The sergeant said that Magda seemed somewhat worried and kept asking what she would tell her children about their father.
The couple had two daughters, aged nine and five-years-old.
“She kept repeating the same question: ‘What am I going to tell the children?’” Antoniou said.
She testified that she never saw Magda cry.
And she seemed upset when she saw a young Greek Cypriot man whom she had had an affair with, the court heard.
The two met in the courtyard of the CID after their arrival coincided.
Pressured by defence lawyer Costas Efstathiou on how she knew Magda knew her husband was dead, Antoniou said: “She said, ‘when we bury him I’ll take the children and go to England’.”
Earlier on, the court heard testimony from inspector George Stylianou, who at the time was a sergeant serving at the police emergency switchboard.
Stylianou said he found out the mobile number of the owner of the burning car and he called it.
“It was ringing but no one replied,” he said.
That was between 3.30am and 4am on July 18.
He later called the home line and Magda picked up.
She said the car belonged to her husband; after she was told it was burning near the Hilton hotel, she asked whether her husband was inside, Stylianou said.
The inspector said Magda had answered the phone after a couple of rings and it seemed she had been awake.
“She did not sound worried,” he said.
“And I was struck by the questions she put to me,” he added.
“Would you consider it natural if she said ‘thanks for the information’?” Efstathiou said.
“What was it that struck you?” he added.
Stylianou said it was the way she had replied; her reaction was different from other similar cases.
“I was impressed by her phone manner; she didn’t seem worried.
“She was calm.
“The way she asked if her husband was in the car struck me,” Stylianou said.
The day had kicked off with Efstathiou cross-examining CID chief Kypros Michaelides who stood his ground under a barrage of questions aimed at disproving the police’s position that Magda was not a suspect when she made the particular statement and that that was why she had not been cautioned.
