The recent arrests made by the Republic of Cyprus of people accused of selling Greek Cypriot-owned property in the north “will not go unanswered”, Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz said on Friday.

“I would like to express here that the recent work carried out on the Greek Cypriot side towards the business world in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is not in line with good faith. I would also like to express that it is not in line with the spirit of good faith,” he said.

“I would also like to express that it is not in line with the spirit of cooperation, and that this will certainly not go unanswered.”

He was speaking at a joint press conference with the north’s ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel during a visit to Cyprus and added that Turkey’s government “will not remain indifferent to efforts to harm the TRNC’s economy by using the law for political reasons”.

Despite this, he said, “the Republic of Turkey is always in favour of diplomacy in the TRNC, we are always in favour of peace, we are always in favour of solutions”.

To this end, he said his country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “played an active role” in reducing tensions between India and Pakistan and added that “very intense diplomacy is being carried out on the issue of Gaza”.

In addition, he said, “I do not know if there is another leader in the world who has made as much effort as our president in the recent tensions between Iran and Israel”.

“We say at every opportunity that these problems must be resolved through negotiations, at the table. We hope that the parties will return to the table as soon as possible, before it is too late, and that these problems will be solved through negotiations,” he said.

Returning to the matter of Cyprus, he said that “as a strong state and a guarantor power, the Republic of Turkey is always on the side of the Turkish Cypriots and will continue to be on their side”.

“No one should have any hesitation or doubt about this,” he added.

Ustel, meanwhile, told Yilmaz that “the Greek Cypriot government is doing everything it can to both destroy our economy and undermine our security”.

The Republic of Cyprus maintains that the arrests are not political in their nature, with government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis having earlier told journalists that “the Republic of Cyprus is acting within the framework of the rule of law, and the arrests for the usurpation of property concern the protection of basic human rights”.

Then asked whether it would be better for there to be a moratorium on such prosecutions so that they do not “come at the expense of talks on the Cyprus issue”, he said that “impunity for violations of property or human rights cannot be a condition, inside or outside of quotation marks, for talks or for an alleged indication of goodwill”.

However, many Turkish Cypriots are unconvinced by this assertion, with Turkish Cypriot opposition political party the CTP’s foreign relations secretary Fikri Toros having told the Cyprus Mail that Turkish Cypriots have been rendered “anxious, intimidated, and threatened” by the arrests.

“These feelings are reviving previous traumas experienced between 1963 and 1974,” he said, adding that Turkish Cypriots “were left with no choice other than having the use of the properties abandoned by Greek Cypriots in one way or another”.

President Nikos Christodoulides had earlier insisted that the arrests “will certainly not stop, no matter what [Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin] Tatar says”, adding that “illegality cannot be justified in any way”, but also somewhat distanced himself from the arrests, insisting that “we do not interfere in the judiciary”.

Two Hungarian nationals were handed prison sentences over the matter last month, with the pair having admitted to promoting and advertising the sale of houses near Kyrenia on the internet.

They were the first to be convicted over the matter.

Meanwhile, the case regarding Simon Aykut is ongoing, as is the case of a German national who reportedly spoke about selling property in the north to Elam MEP Geadis Geadi during a flight to Larnaca.