First public statement by the then head of Limassol CID Nikos Sofokleous on the death of Thanasis Nikolaou.
Sofokleous made public the statement he gave on June 16 last year to two criminal investigators, Savvas Matsas and Antonis Alexopoulos.
According to him, at that time he was in charge of the Limassol Police Station and had been informed by Limassol Police Director Andreas Iatropoulos to go to the scene where a young man was found dead under the Alassa bridge.
"I remained at the Central Police Station and waited for the forensic pathologist Panikos Stavrianos to come and go to the scene with me. Mr Panikos Stavrianos had been previously informed to come to the Central Police Station but I do not know from whom he was informed. The policy is that once the first police officer goes to the scene he informs his supervisors and the duty officer and they in turn inform the coroner who is on duty to go to the scene. After he came we went with a police vehicle to the scene where Athanasios Nikolaou was found dead."
As he says after the examination conducted at the scene, Mr Stavrianos told him that it was a pure suicide from a fall from a height and ruled out the possibility of a criminal act. "The final decision on who will investigate each incident rests with the local police chief," he noted.
Since the coroner ruled that it was not a criminal act, the local police station was instructed to investigate the case as an unnatural death. As long as I was at the scene, the Limassol Police Director did not visit the scene. If the coroner even suspected that it was a criminal act, then the investigation would have been undertaken by the Limassol CID," Sofokleous concluded in his testimony.
It is recalled that in their conclusion the criminal investigators found criminal responsibility against the then Police Director, the Head of the Limassol Police Station, the station chief of Lania and the then Medical Examiner.
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