Government to publish full list of missing persons

THE GOVERNMENT will for the first time officially release the list of persons missing since the 1974 Turkish invasion, an official announcement said yesterday.

So far, the list had been kept under wraps, with only the number of missing being disclosed.

The full list of missing persons will be made public by June 22, all necessary information about each missing person will be published, and a committee will register and examine every objection the relatives of the missing may have, said Tassos Tzionis, Director of the Cyprus Problem Department at the Foreign Ministry.

The identities of remains of war dead or missing persons exhumed from two local cemeteries last summer will also be announced this week, he added.

"This week, more families of missing or war dead will be notified about the results of the identification process through DNA," Tzionis yesterday told the House Committee dealing with the issue of the missing.

So far, two persons listed as missing have been identified through the DNA process, carried out by forensic experts of the international body of Physicians for Human rights, and the Cyprus Institute of Genetics and Neurology.

One was a 16-year-old Cypriot and the other a Greek soldier.

A third person, a Cypriot US passport holder listed as missing, had been identified earlier.

On the issue of Turkish Cypriot missing, Tzionis said: "We have given all information about 200 Turkish Cypriot missing persons, but we cannot proceed with exhumations of remains of Turkish Cypriots without their consent and their co-operation."

The Turkish Cypriots have so far failed to co-operate with the UN and the Greek Cypriot side to implement a 1997 agreement to exchange information about the location of graves, and return remains to their families.

Tzionis repeated an appeal to the relatives of the missing to give DNA samples to enable the identification process to go on.

The president of the Committee of Relatives of the Missing, Nicos Theodosiou, suggested that the list should be printed, with photographs, so that anyone who recognising a missing person could come forward and testify.

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