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Cypriot army captain pleads guilty to killing five women and two girls Cypriot officer given seven life sentences for serial killing
(32 minutes later)
A Cypriot army captain has pleaded guilty to the premeditated murder and kidnapping of five women and two girls. A Greek Cypriot army captain was given seven life sentences after pleading guilty to killing five women and two children in a three-year murder spree in which he preyed on his victims online.
Nikos Metaxas, 35, reading from a prepared statement before his sentencing on a dozen charges later on Monday, told a three-judge criminal court panel that he did not “have any clear answers” as to why he killed the seven victims and that he had struggled to figure out the “why and how”. The case, involving the worst peacetime atrocities against women in Cyprus in memory, caused outrage and horror on an island where serious crime is relatively rare, and forced the resignation of the justice minister and sacking of the police chief.
He said his cooperation with police investigators was “the least” he could do to ease the pain he caused to the families of the victims and his own family. Metaxas killed three Filipino women and a daughter of one of them, as well as a Nepalese woman and a Romanian mother and daughter. Nikos Metaxas, 35, pleaded guilty to 12 charges relating to the premeditated murder and abduction of the seven people – who came from the Philippines, Romania and Nepal – between September 2016 and July 2018. The two children, aged six and eight, were daughters of two of the women.
“I cannot go back in time and undo what I have done,” Metaxas, clad in a bulletproof vest, told a packed courtroom. The sentence, passed on Monday, is the toughest ever imposed by the Cypriot justice system.
He asked authorities for a scientific panel to interview him in order to delve into his psyche and find the reasons for his actions in what is believed to be the east Mediterranean island nation’s first serial killer case. Metaxas broke down in tears as police read the indictment against him.
A state prosecutor said six of the victims died of strangulation while the seventh, of a head injury. “I have committed abhorrent crimes,” he said, expressing condolences to the families of the victims.
Police say the accused, a divorced father of two, met the women online. The victims were mostly employed as housekeepers on the island and disappeared between September 2016 and August 2018.
The police chief was sacked and the justice minister resigned following accounts of bungled investigations by police who did not take the disappearances seriously because the women were foreign.
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