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There is a deafening silence from the authorities and lack of reassurance as Cyprus comes to terms with the brutal realisation it has bred a homegrown serial killer that preyed on vulnerable foreign women knowing society didn’t care enough about them to do anything.
This is the shocking, painful and, quite frankly, embarrassing truth beginning to rear its ugly head from the police probe into the gruesome serial killings of several foreign women and two young children.
Amid their shock and disbelief, Cypriots are also getting a quick education on the psychology of a serial killer – the normal guy next door who wouldn’t hurt a fly but has dark secrets and twisted sexual desires.
A 35-year-old Greek Cypriot National Guard officer has allegedly confessed to the killings of five women he dated for sex before killing them then dumped them in a disused mine or some other obscure location in the full knowledge nobody would look for them.
And he was right because the cold-blooded killer understood how society worked with unchallenged institutionalised racism, dressed up as apathy, that exists in bodies like the police and state institutions in general.
Add a sprinkling of misogyny and sexism to such enlightened institutions and you will have some idea how far Cyprus has to travel before it becomes a fully adjusted adult that is tolerant of difference and sensitive to diverse cultures.
It is also quite possible their bodies would never have been found if not for a German tourist going to take photographs at an abandoned mine in Mitsero where the first body of 38-year-old Marry Rose Tiburcio was discovered on April 14.
There was also touch of luck, or fate, in this gruesome discovery as the body only surfaced from the mineshaft due to unusually prolonged heavy rain on the island. Now more dead women are being unearthed as the death count rises.
Mary Rose and her young daughter were reported missing last year but the evidence suggests that despite a child being involved police did not even bother to do the basics. It’s not as if scores of kids go missing every week.
Police have been accused of displaying “unprecedented indifference” because the missing woman and her child were foreign and not Cypriot, so “who cares what happened to them?”
Red flags were raised on more than one occasion by friends and employers yet still the police were unmoved to use their initiative and see if anything untoward or suspicious was afoot.
Somehow they decided that the woman and her child just simply took-off from their home, school and employment to disappear in the Turkish-held north of the island for reasons unknown – how convenient from them to surmise the pair had gone to place they cannot reach.
Despite a child being involved, the police failed to put out a more general alert and connect the dots with other authorities and organisations.
And the question has to be asked if the police would have behaved in a similar fashion if this was a Cypriot child and mother reported mysteriously missing? I don’t think you need me to answer.
The pattern of three missing Filipina women presumed murdered, is depressingly familiar. Their disappearance was reported to police on several occasions over a period of time, but it seems nobody went out of their way to physically look for them or uncover some leads.
More evidence is emerging that the killer also murdered a Romanian mother-and-daughter who also went missing.
There has also been no explanation as to the source of this inertia, such as lack of resources, personnel, equipment and leadership, or restrictive legislation.
Could it be down to simply bad policing from a force that usually gets away with being incompetent and ill-equipped to face the challenge of modern crime and criminals?
There was also no pressure from society or the media asking questions about such disappearances, again because they were foreign workers, invisible outsiders that we need not worry ourselves about.
As a society, we must all take a share of the blame because this kind of attitude displayed by the people in authority is tolerated, we tacitly consent to their lack of civic duty or discriminatory behaviour because we do not challenge it.
Police approached these missing cases with total disdain because they somehow viewed these women as not warranting the attention of police resources.
It is the system that has taught them that such behaviour is acceptable as accountability is not something that applies to public service.
When established institutions and state services are not founded on the ideals and ethics of responsibility, public services and meritocracy but self-interest and nepotism, then you are asking for trouble.
This is not to say we should all become new puritans overnight, but we must invest in a society that is less divisive, more accepting and sensitive to discrimination and prejudice in all its forms, starting with our education system.
Calling for the head of the police chief or the justice minister over what may have been a preventable series of crimes will not get us very far if the next person who comes in presides over the same flawed system that needs a 21st-century overhaul in structure and attitude.
Cyprus is stained with the blood of a serial killer and it doesn’t wash off that easily.
