Authorities had been tailing a man of Azeri background for some time before they arrested him last weekend on suspicion of espionage and terrorism-related activities, fresh reports said on Tuesday.

Citing its sources, daily Phileleftheros spoke of “an agency cooperating with the Cypriot police” which had tracked the suspect’s movements before the decision was taken to detain the man.

CID leads the investigation.

The same newspaper said that a CID officer – testifying in court last Saturday during the suspect’s remand hearing – told of how the Azeri had been the subject of “physical surveillance”.

The suspect was being tailed by an agent, the paper said.

The Cyprus Mail understands that police have yet to charge the suspect.

The man was arrested on Saturday, and later that day appeared before Limassol district court, which granted police a request to keep the suspect in their custody for eight days.

Cypriot news outlets reported the suspect is a man of Azeri background and had been arrested in the Zakaki suburb of the coastal city of Limassol.

He is alleged to have had a British RAF military base in nearby Akrotiri under surveillance, as well as Cyprus’s own Andreas Papandreou airbase in Paphos. He had allegedly been monitoring the Akrotiri base since mid-April.

In the man’s possession the police reportedly found a high-resolution Nikon Coolpix  camera with a 125x magnification lens.

Phileleftheros now reports that the suspect holds a British passport.

It remained unclear whether he has dual nationality, and whether he is only of Azeri ethnicity or also has Azerbaijani nationality.

In addition to Cypriot media, international media – including in the United Kingdom, Israel and the Middle East – have picked up on the story.

Earlier, Phileleftheros reported that last Friday – the day prior to the arrest – the suspect had been spotted near the Andreas Papandreou airbase in Paphos.

According to the paper, time-wise this coincided with news reports coming out on Friday, to the effect that US transport aircraft and US Marines were expected to touch down at the airbase.

In the early evening of last Friday, Greek publication Hellas Journal had reported that US military transport aircraft had arrived, or were arriving, at the Paphos base, as part of a buildup of US forces amid rising tensions in the Israel-Iran conflict.

On Saturday, the day of the arrest, Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar posted on social media that a planned attack on Israeli citizens by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been averted due to co-operation between Israeli and Cypriot security services.

“Thanks to the activity of the Cypriot security authorities, in co-operation with Israeli security services, the terror attack was thwarted,” Sa’ar claimed on X, without elaborating.

Meanwhile in Greece, authorities have arrested an ‘Azeri man’ suspected of espionage on the island of Crete, home to a Nato military base.

Greek authorities are investigating if the 26-year-old was monitoring the base in Souda – a strategic facility for Greece, the United States and Nato in the eastern Mediterranean.

The 26-year-old, arrested on Sunday, had reportedly been staying since June 18 in a hotel near the naval and air force base in western Crete. More than 5,000 photographs and encryption software are said to have been found on a laptop that was seized, along with other digital equipment, from the hotel room.