Limassol police round up illegal immigrants

EIGHTEEN illegal aliens were yesterday arrested in Limassol after an immigration department sweep.

Ten Iranians, five Syrians and three Jordanians were rounded up after an immigration department operation.

All the men had been living and working on the island without permits.

The operation started at 4 am and lasted for four hours.

The men were arrested while waiting for their employers to pick them up.

The sweep was part of an ongoing island-wide campaign to locate and arrest illegal aliens.

“The foreigners were transferred to the central prison, and the procedure for their deportation has already began,” a senior immigration department official said yesterday.

The campaign for finding and arresting illegal foreigners will continue, he added.

Meanwhile, the survivors picked up when a ship sank off Cape Greco on New Year’s Eve have been put up at the Pefkos hotel in Limassol while police look into the incident.

Police suspect that the 17 survivors of the shipwreck may not be telling the truth about the incident, since weather conditions when the ship sank were good and the seas were very calm.

The 17 survivors of the Syrian-flagged Seven Seas cargo ship were rescued by the combined efforts of a British bases helicopter and the Cyprus coastguard.

The survivors were found in or around a dinghy lifeboat.

An extensive coastguard search failed to locate any trace of the 4,700 tonne vessel that was said to have gone down.

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.