(26 Apr 2019) Cyprus faced the prospect of a potential serial killer on Friday after police said a detained military officer confessed to killing five foreign women and two girls.
The country's president expressed "deep sorrow and concern" at the murders, many of them Asian women who came to work on the Mediterranean island.
As President Nicos Anastasiades spoke, police intensified their search for more bodies possibly dumped at a firing range, a reservoir and a man-made lake near an abandoned mine 32 kilometres (20 miles) west of Nicosia, the capital.
The scale of the alleged crimes by a Cypriot National Guard captain has horrified the small nation of over a million people, where multiple killings are rare.
Five British law enforcement officials - including a coroner, a psychiatrist and investigators who specialise in multiple homicides - were coming to help with the investigation.
On Thursday, the 35-year-old suspect, who can't yet be named because he hasn't been formally charged, told investigators he had killed four more people than he had previously admitted to.
Police said the suspect will appear in court on Saturday for another custody hearing.
The victims - all foreigners- include Marry Rose Tiburcio, 38, from the Philippines, whose bound body was found April 14 in a flooded mineshaft.
She and her six-year-old daughter had been missing since May of last year.
The girl remains missing and authorities believe she was also killed by the suspect.
Divers have entered the reservoir to search for her, but have not found her body yet.
Authorities tracked down the officer last week by scouring Tiburcio's online messages.
Six days later, police discovered another body in the same mineshaft, identified by Cypriot media as 28-year-old Arian Palanas Lozano, also from the Philippines.
A third alleged victim, also of Filipino descent, was 31-year-old Maricar Valtez Arquiola, who had been missing since December 2017.
The suspect initially denied killing Arquiola, but reversed his denial after a court hearing on Thursday, a police official said.
The suspect on Thursday also pointed investigators to a military firing range, where they discovered another unidentified body, which according to the suspect belonged to a woman of either Nepalese or Indian descent.
Cypriot police are also looking for a Romanian mother and daughter.
Cypriot media identified them as Livia Florentina Bunea, 36, and eight-year-old Elena Natalia Bunea, who are believed to have been missing since September 2016.
Cyprus police have faced criticism from immigrant activists who said they didn't act fast enough to investigate the whereabouts of some of the victims, many of them domestic workers.
The island nation has 80 unsolved missing persons cases, going back to 1990.
Police chief Zacharias Chrysostomou said a three-member panel has been assigned to probe whether police followed all the correct protocol in recent missing persons cases.
According to the state-run Cyprus News Agency, an investigator had told the court at an earlier hearing that the suspect admitted to killing one woman he met online after having sex with her.
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