Oxana Rantseva was a 20-year-old girl who came to Cyprus in 2001 to work as a dancer, or so she thought. Twelve days after her arrival, she was found dead on the pavement of Gladstonos Street in Limassol, beneath a flat where she had been imprisoned and forced into prostitution.
Her death was recorded as suicide, and her father began a years-long struggle to expose the true circumstances of his child’s death.
The case implicated police officers who, days earlier during a previous escape attempt, had arrested her and handed her back to the cabaret owner who had brought her to Cyprus.
Finding doors closed, her father took the case to the ECHR, which ruled against Cyprus. After the ruling, a criminal investigation was ordered, which acquitted all involved.
Her father, unconvinced, continued sending letters to the Attorney General’s office, receiving responses that “the passage of time makes collecting new evidence impossible” and that she likely tried to climb down from the balcony while drunk, as chemical analysis supporting the forensic examination had detected alcohol in her urine.
Then came Andriana Nicolaou, insisting her son’s death wasn’t suicide. She was partially vindicated, but no one was punished. Police and the medical examiner had convinced everyone except the parents that it was suicide.
In 2012 followed Christina Kalaitzidou’s death, which according to the initial medical examiner’s report, resulted from a fire sparked by a lit cigarette in her bedroom. Here too, it took her father’s fight to prove she was murdered by her husband.
Then there was Petrana Milkova’s case, whose body underwent five autopsies before revealing she had been mauled by dogs.
Following this was the case of a 70-year-old in a care home, whose death was attributed by the medical examiner to a headlock.
However, CCTV footage showed the man had fallen, and a worker, attempting to lift him by pulling his clothes, had accidentally suffocated him.
And today we have the death of the Pakistani man (whose name we’ll never know).
With a bullet in his back, the medical examiner ruled out foul play. And now, we’re expected to believe that while the bullet came from a police officer’s gun, as revealed four days later, there was no cover-up attempt by the police.
Simply that medical examiners can’t distinguish between a wound from a bullet and one from a stone.
As for the victims, Oxana was drunk and the Pakistani was a trafficker.
And we all lived happily ever after – especially the authorities.
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