Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436
No, it was not a Hollywood movie, an American thriller where a group of five or six young students, barely 15 or 16 years old, would witness a double murder and would have to remain silent for the rest of their lives… No, it was not a scene from a movie where they would not even talk about what they had witnessed amongst themselves and it would take a lot of courage on the part of one of them to be able to come up with the information and share with me, after a lot of encouragement from a mutual friend…
They had been a group of young students, barely 15 or 16 years old and had gone to a field to collect some fruit… It might have been spring time or early summer since they had been wearing short sleeves, as he remembers… Perhaps it was April or May 1964…
The place was in Parissinos, Strovolos, not far from the CINEPLEX… In the field they had gone to, there were orange trees, fig trees, gonnara… Perhaps they had escaped from school to have some fun and some fruit and had come to this field… Outside the field which were fenced, it was all open space – no buildings in this area in those times but empty fields stretching on and on…
While collecting and eating fruit, the youngsters had heard the noise of a car, a police Landover approaching and they panicked! Since the field did not belong to any of them, they thought they were going to get caught stealing fruit! They all tried to hide, take cover, lay down on the ground so they would not be seen stealing the fruit…
The Landover had stopped just on the edge of the fenced field and two men with Sten guns had got out and had taken out two persons – one of them was middle aged and the other a younger person…
They stood them side by side facing the road and shot them with the Sten guns they had…
There had been some heaps of earth so the youngsters assumed that either there was a well there or the guys with the guns had opened a hole from before in order to bury these two unknown persons…
The youngsters had assumed that those two unknown persons executed there had been two Turkish Cypriots… It was daytime, perhaps early afternoon…
The youngsters were shocked from the shooting and were terrified of what they had seen had left after the Landover had left and would close their mouths for the rest of their lives, not even talking amongst themselves about what they had witnessed… Over time, two of these youngsters had died so there remained only 3 or 4 of them alive, who remembered this shocking experience…
One day about three years ago, one of them would tell this story to a mutual friend and she would find me and tell me what she had heard. She would even take me to the place and show me the site where two `unknown` and probably `missing persons` had been killed. He would decline from coming and showing this place – his shock continued after so many years…
On the 9th of December 2013 Monday, I would have a brief encounter with our mutual friend with this witness and she would ask me what had happened. Sure, I had told the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee about this place but it would be much better if the witness himself would come and show us. She would call him immediately and we would agree to meet the following day around CINEPLEX. I would immediately call the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee and they would agree to come and meet the witness.
So on the 10th of December 2013, Tuesday we would meet the witness… He would be sad and you could read that sadness from his face…
`How did you feel when this happened?` I would ask him and he would say `I thought that lives of some people did not count… That life was cheap for some… It was a big shock and we did not even speak amongst ourselves about what happened, afterwards… We closed our mouths for a lot of years… I did not even tell my wife about this – one Christmas night when we were abroad in 1989 or 1990, I told her about it… It took me so many years to speak about it even to my wife…`
Since they had not seen whether the two `unknown` persons were actually buried here, the officials of the Cyprus Missing Persons' Committee would have to make further investigations about this. Had they been buried here or further up where there were some wells? Was there a well here or was it a hole they had dug with the purpose of burying the two `unknown` persons that they would kill? There were other wells across the road so could they have been buried in those wells?
In two of the wells further up, the remains of a total of nine `missing` Turkish Cypriots - `missing' from 1963-64 – had been found and these remains had been returned to their families and they have been buried. So apparently this whole area was an area where they killed and buried people in the wells…
We would thank the witness and our mutual friend for coming and showing us the location of the crime that took place back in 1964 and say goodbye to them… The witness would not give his phone number – he would still carry the fear and shock of those days locked up in his heart… If it was not for the humanity and encouragement from our mutual friend, perhaps he would carry his secret all the way to his grave and would never speak up… She, like an angel would encourage him to tell her the whole story, to show her the place and later on would manage to convince him to come in person and show us this area… There aren't enough words to thank her for doing this…
I will make a call on those young students of those days who had witnessed to this incident to call me with or without their names and tell me if they have seen anything more or if they have heard any more details…
No, it's not a Hollywood movie, not a thriller we watch on TV where five or six youngsters witness a double murder and have to stay silent for many years, fearing even to speak about it amongst themselves and one of them, almost half a century later would come to show where the murders took place… This is the island of Cyprus, we are in 2014, we are talking about two `unknown` persons killed in 1964 in broad daylight in Parissinos, Strovolos, Nicosia… Please share if you know more details so that we can give some answers and perhaps some remains to the relatives of those two `missing` and `unknown` persons… My phone number is 99 966518 and if you want to remain anonymous, you may remain anonymous. Thank you…
Photo: Not a movie but actual life, this was the scene of the double murders...
(*) Article published in the POLITIS newspaper on the 12th of January 2014, Sunday.
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