The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the arrest of the man who stands accused of espionage, and the subsequent search of his apartment, were legal.

According to newspaper Phileleftheros, the man’s lawyer, Efstathios Efstathiou, had argued that the “uncritical acceptance of undocumented and unverified information as a sufficient legal basis” for the warrants, which originated “from a third country outside the European Union” constituted a “fundamental error” in the court of first instance, the Limassol district court.

“The dependence of an EU member state on information from a third country, the source of which is inaccessible, unverifiable, and not cross-referenced, is not permissible,” he argued, with that third country understood to be the State of Israel/

He added that the Limassol district court “had no evidence to objectively assess the reliability of the information, the content of which was not accompanied by anything else, nor was it confirmed by independent findings”.

“The so-called confirmation of the information received, through physical surveillance by the Republic of Cyprus’ authorities, constitutes circular logic and is limited to superficial observations,” he said.

However, the court found that the information received by the Cypriot authorities did not constitute “general and vague allegations”, and stated that “the information from the foreign country was confirmed following physical monitoring of the applicant over a specific period of time by the Republic of Cyprus’ authorities”.

It added that the police’s suspicions “were entirely reasonable”, and regarding the man’s continued detention, said there is a “visible risk he would escape from Cyprus”, and that there was also a “visible risk” of “interference in the work of the justice system and of investigators”.

This interference, it said, could include the “destruction of evidence”.

The man is alleged to have had both the British Royal Air Force’s base at Akrotiri and the national guard’s Andreas Papandreou airbase in Paphos under surveillance

On the day of his arrest in June, Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar wrote in a post on social media that a planned attack on Israeli citizens by Iran’s Islamic revolutionary guard had been averted thanks to cooperation between the authorities of Cyprus and Israel.

“The Islamic revolutionary guard– the terror arm of the Iranian regime – tried to carry out an attack on Israeli citizens in Cyprus. Thanks to the activity of the Cypriot security authorities, in cooperation with Israeli security services, the terror attack was thwarted. Israel thanks Cyprus for its swift and effective actions,” he wrote at the time.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s Business Secretary parliamentary under-secretary of state for the armed forces Luke Pollard also passed comment on the matter.

“On our sovereign base areas in Cyprus, it is essential that we look not only at how we can protect them, but at how we can protect them from the risk of Iranian retaliation, which is why we have enhanced the force protection measures on our bases in Cyprus,” he said.

He added that it was for this reason that Sir Keir Starmer had “ordered the further deployment of Typhoons at our base at RAF Akrotiri, and why we are investing in ground-based air defence there”.

The arrest came amid a back-and-forth of missile strikes between Israel and Iran, with a ceasefire eventually being brokered between the two countries later that month.

During that conflict, it had been reported that the US could ask the UK for permission to station aircraft in Cyprus for future attacks on Iran, with those reports coming after Iran had warned the US, the UK, and France that their bases and ships in the region would be targeted if they helped to stop its missile strikes on Israel.

The UK eventually stationed what Pollard described as “about 14” Typhoon fighter jets at Akrotiri at the height of the conflict, with the UK’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy having said that the country’s bases in Cyprus were “hugely important at this time”