The Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) has exhumed the remains of 1,700 people since the excavations began in 2006 until today, which have yielded 1,268 identifications so far.
The figures were provided on Monday at a press conference, on the occasion of the start of the 40th Missing Persons’ Love Marathon, by the Greek Cypriot member of the CMP, Leonidas Pantelides.
According to the CMP representative, the process began in 2006 and since then over 1,700 excavations have been carried out and bones corresponding to approximately 1,700 individuals have been found, yielding 1,268 identifications so far, of which 1,053 relate to individuals from the official list of the missing persons and the rest from the list of the fallen and the so-called list of 126.
As Pantelides said in his speech, the CMP is currently working with eight archaeological crews and employs over a hundred Cypriot scientists from both communities, noting that currently its crews are conducting surveys in Sisklipo, Agia Irini, Kapouti, Trachonas (military area), Lapithos, Assia, Makedonitissa, and Agios Dometios, near the ELDYK camp.
Furthermore, he said that the budget of the programme amounts to about 4 million per year, with a large part coming from the European Union, adding that the second largest contribution comes from the Cypriot government.
In her address, the Acting Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, Anna Aristotelous, said that over 49 per cent of the missing persons cases are still pending to date, while of the missing persons from the 1963/64 inter-communal conflicts, 17 out of 44 have been identified, three of whom are mainland Greeks but none of them found to date.
Moreover, she said that the recent first identification from the pile of bones that had been soaked with chemicals, is perhaps the most important step in efforts to resolve a problem dating back to 1979 and which is expected to provide answers to the families of the missing and fallen.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkish troops invaded and occupied 37% of its territory. Since then, the fate of hundreds of people remains unknown.
A Committee on Missing Persons has been established, upon agreement between the leaders of the two communities, with the scope of exhuming, identifying and returning to their relatives the remains of 492 Turkish Cypriots and 1,510 Greek Cypriots, who went missing during the inter-communal fighting of 1963-1964 and in 1974.
