The military court where the five Greek Cypriots who were arrested in the north are standing trial will hand down its verdict next week, after the final defence witness was heard on Wednesday.

The defence’s final witness was Ismail Ozkan, a graphology and forgery expert from Turkey, who had also previously worked as an inspector and as the director of a police laboratory.

He told the court that the dispute between the prosecution and the defence over whether the Greek Cypriots handed four or five identity cards to the police when crossing to the north on July 19 – the dispute on which the case hinges – could be resolved by seeing if the crossing point police officer Hakan Ozkanturk’s fingerprints could be detected on the fifth identity card.

According to newspaper Ozgur Gazete’s editor-in-chief Pinar Barut, who was present in court on Wednesday, Ozkan said that if the identity card had been checked for fingerprints in July and the police officer’s fingerprints had been detected on the fifth identity card, “these hearings would not have happened”.

The prosecution objected to this, saying that there would be many other fingerprints on the identity card and that the police officer’s fingerprints would not be detectable.

However, Ozkan then said that even now, a check could be carried out on the identity card to determine whether the police officer ever touched it, adding, “we have high-quality methods for detecting fingerprints, even on surfaces which are decades old”.

The prosecution then said Ozkan “is not an expert on fingerprints”, but Ozkan maintained his position that the identity card should have been checked for fingerprints during the course of the police’s investigation.

The verdict will be handed down on October 15.

One of the five Greek Cypriots has been charged with illegally entering the north when the five crossed into the north via the Strovilia crossing point, near Famagusta, on July 19, while the other four are accused of aiding and abetting the illegal entry. The five Greek Cypriots deny the charges.

Meanwhile, two of the five will next appear at a civilian court in Trikomo on October 21.

There, they face charges of privacy violations, which they allegedly committed while in Trikomo on July 19. The remaining three Greek Cypriots had earlier faced charges of trespassing and breaching the peace, but those charges were dropped on October 1.

All five remain on bail, with the north’s supreme court having found in two separate cases that earlier remand orders against them had been handed down illegally.