Veyzi Bandur was on Wednesday sentenced to life in prison for the premeditated murder of Turkish Cypriot Tansu Cidan, who died in the central prison in 2022.

Bandur had been found guilty of premeditated murder in July after testimonies showed that he had beaten Cidan “repeatedly and for a long time” both on the day before he was murdered and on the day of the murder.

He had initially been in prison after having been charged with possession of a firearm and explosives, and was in fact still on trial at the time of the murder. He was sentenced to four and a half years behind bars for possession of a firearm and three years for possession of explosives in 2023, with those sentences running concurrently.

Given this to be the case, the court on Wednesday clarified that his life sentence will run consecutively rather than concurrently with those sentences and thus will in effect begin when the four-and-a-half-year sentence handed down in 2023 is spent.

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He and another fellow inmate, Mohammadian Reza, had also been found guilty of the possession and supply of illegal drugs. Reza was on Wednesday sentenced to a year in prison, with that sentence to run concurrent with the sentence he was already serving on the day of the murder.

Meanwhile, two prison guards were sentenced to three years in prison each for their roles in Cidan’s death.

The guards, named as Giorgos Kyriakides and Savvas Christou, had been found guilty of manslaughter, with the court in July finding that they caused Cidan’s death “through unlawful omission”.

The court found at the time that they had “failed to conduct adequate inspections, provide safeguarding, take protective measures, provide medical care, or prevent danger to [Cidan’s] life”.

On Wednesday, the court said it had not found any “aggravating factors”, and that the pair did not “benefit” from Cidan’s death, but that they had “failed to take the appropriate measures” and “left [Cidan] in the ‘care’ of his fellow detainees”.

This, the court said, constitutes “serious negligence”.

Kyriakides, Christou and fellow prison guard Stelios Georgiou were all found guilty of causing death through a reckless and thoughtless act, due to their failure to take protective measures. All three were also found guilty of a neglect of duty.

Georgiou was on Wednesday handed an 18-month prison sentence, suspended for three years.

The court’s decision also made reference to “systemic problems” faced by the prison system at the time, speaking of “overcrowding and understaffing which affected the proper execution of the prison guards’ duties”.

It said that prisoners held the keys to their own cells, that head counts were “not being done correctly”, that hourly patrols were being “omitted” by the guards, and that prisoners “were not spending the nights in their cells”.

On the day of the murder, it said, “no check, patrol, or head count was carried out properly”, while prison guards “passed by the victim’s cell while he was being abused, without anyone entering it to see what was going on”.