Human bones belonging to those who died in 1974, as well as people missing from as far back as 1964, have been placed in boxes and left among furniture in a warehouse in the now unused State Fair grounds, it was reported on Saturday.
Politis newspaper reported that some of the remains belong to people who died during the 1964 intercommunal violence and mostly to Greek soldiers who came to Cyprus to defend the island during the 1974 Turkish invasion.
However Humanitarian Affairs commissioner Anna Aristotelous said the photo used by Politis (above) depicted a box of bones from a plastic skeleton used for educational purposes.
She said boxes in other photographs were empty and it was “a shame that a primarily humanitarian issue was the object of misinformation.”
Aristotelous said the actual remains were kept in a suitable area with limited access.
The warehouse is used by various state services to store office equipment and Politis said many people have access to it.
The daily visited the warehouse and reported that many remains have been thrown haphazardly into unsealed cardboard boxes and bones are visible in some of them.
Politis said that most boxes contain bones of Greek soldiers killed during the invasion.
These remains have been identified and some boxes bear the names of the fallen, while others have a Greek flag on them.
The Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) told Politis that the remains they exhume are sent directly to their laboratory within the old Nicosia airport in the UN-controlled buffer zone.
From there, the identified remains are handed over to the families.
Other identifications are carried out by a programme run by the Republic of Cyprus.
A source told Politis that some of the remains sent to the warehouse had been sprayed with chemicals when buried and could not be identified.
Other remains had been identified but the relatives had not been found or had refused to receive them, including family members of fallen Greek soldiers.
The source added that remains had been placed in boxes and transferred to the warehouse under then presidential commissioner Photis Photiou, with the intention of having them sorted and properly stored in a separate part of the warehouse, which apparently never happened.
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