The remains of a Jewish refugee killed at a British detention camp in Cyprus in 1948 have been identified in Israel after 78 years.

Israeli authorities announced on Wednesday that the grave of Shlomo Haimson had been identified at a cemetery in Haifa, nearly eight decades after he was killed during an attempted escape from the Karaolos detention camp in Famagusta.

Haimson was shot by camp guards in September 1948, several months after the establishment of the State of Israel.

He was subsequently buried at a Jewish cemetery in Cyprus in Margo, a Jewish Cypriot farming settlement since 1897.

The remains of those buried at the cemetery were later transferred to Israel in 1970.

Most were buried in Haifa without individual identification, leaving Haimson’s grave among those that remained anonymous for decades.

An investigation by the Israeli army’s missing persons directorate, the military rabbinate, the defence ministry and the association of Jewish prisoners in Cyprus established that Haimson was buried in grave number 11, in the second row of the cemetery’s Jewish immigrant section.

The case dates to the British detention of Jewish refugees seeking to reach Mandatory Palestine.

Between 1946 and 1949, more than 52,000 Jews were detained in camps across Cyprus by the British, many of them Holocaust survivors.

The camps were established after Britain began intercepting ships carrying Jewish refugees attempting to enter Palestine, which was then under British rule.