A box file full of evidence was the central subject of Thursday’s court hearing of the trial of the 49-year-old woman who stands accused of having sold Greek Cypriot-owned property in the north.

Prosecution lawyer Anna Mattheou presented the box filed in court, showing the court handwriting samples and asking the woman to say which of them were written by her.

The woman said she had written some of the samples, while also indicating that other samples were definitely not in her handwriting, and that she could not tell if some were or were not written by her.

Mattheou then demanded that she say who had written some of the other samples, but the woman refused, saying that this is “personal data” and that she “cannot name individuals due to the presence of press in the room”.

Defence lawyer Sotiris Argyrou said the woman could write down the names of the people who had written the samples, but judge Nikolas Georgiades said that “in all countries, the hearings are held in public, and transparency equals democracy”.

The woman then said that she could not say with certainty who wrote the samples, with Mattheou then interjecting, saying the woman is “evading” answering the question and that “everyone recognises their own handwriting”.

To this, the woman said that “even the police graphologist” had been confused by her handwriting.

Mattheou then pointed out that the words “mosquito” and “floor” had been misspelled in the same way in various samples, and that this suggested that all the handwriting in the box file was hers.

“Do you want us to believe that a person by chance made the same mistake as you did? You wrote the words in all the places,” she said.

The woman responded, saying she was “certain” that some handwritten samples in the box files also belonged to others.

Asked why she had the documents with her when she was arrested, she said she was going to hand them over to someone in Germany, and added that it was information which had interested her, since she had also been interested in buying property in the north.

Mattheou then said again that the woman had written all the handwritten samples in the box file, with the woman replying, “one hundred per cent, they were not written by me”.

Then, Mattheou returned to the matter of the woman’s arrest last year, which had been the central issue of recent hearings. She said the woman’s knowledge of English “was such that she could fully understand what was being said to her” when she was being arrested.

In response, the woman said that “I did not understand that and I asked to be given all the documents and a list of my rights in German.”

She added that after having spent a year in prison and after taking lessons, she now understands “20 per cent of the English language”.

Though the topic of discussion strayed into the woman’s prior actions, Wednesday’s hearing was formally a continuation of the “trial within a trial” over the circumstances surrounding the woman’s arrest.

The woman’s lawyers argue that the manner in which she was arrested, as well as the seizure of her luggage and the search of her electronic devices, was illegal.

Her next hearing will take place on July 7, with further hearings scheduled for July 9 and July 16.