By Charlie Charalambous
ALLEGATIONS by a former police boss that his superiors released a drug suspect from custody after he had refused to do so will be investigated by parliament.
Although Police HQ have dismissed claims by former drug squad commander Nicos Kazafaniotis as “unfounded”, the House Ad Hoc Committee yesterday demanded it be completely briefed on the matter.
Committee chairman Doros Theodorou raised the issue during a discussion of drug-related crime, and called on attending deputy police chief Andreas Stephanou to inform the House.
But Stephanou was not in a position to divulge further facts about the case in the public arena.
“I would like to be allowed time to gather the information which I would like to give behind close doors,” he said.
All he would say was that there were legal proceedings under way which involved the suspects mentioned in the particular drug case.
But Theodorou stressed that the committee could not pledge that what was said behind closed doors would remain classified information.
“We don’t want to give the public the wrong impression that we are trying to keep this quiet. If we think facts should be known, then they won’t be kept a secret.”
Akel deputy Aristofanis Georgiou also requested that Kazafaniotis be called to the next meeting so the committee could hear his side of the story.
Kazafaniotis has claimed that on August 21 an order came from the police leadership to release a drug suspect who was in custody and that he was put under intense pressure to do so when he refused.
Despite the “illegal order”, the suspect was released when the police hierarchy went over his head, Kazafaniotis claimed in a written statement.
He suggested that this incident – among other differences with the police command – had made him to retire early from the force.
Police HQ has responded by saying that the suspect had been wrongly arrested and that his release was linked to pending drug investigations.
According to reports, the suspect was in fact a police informer and, and had been arrested instead of another drug suspect in a raid on a house carried out on orders from Kazafaniotis himself.
