Omirou call to ‘act quickly’ over files in Greece on Missing

Former House President Yiannakis Omirou on Wednesday called on the government to “act quickly and effectively” to ensure the delivery of National Guard files from Greece concerning 1974 which contain information about people who went missing during that period.

The files are currently in Greece, and Omirou said they contain “valuable information about the Missing persons created by the Cyprus tragedy”, and that they were “illegally taken to Greece by Greek officers”.

With this in mind, he said successive Greek governments have thus far refused to hand over the files.

“Because what has been revealed, to the extent that has been confirmed, constitutes a colossal provocation which poses the risk of eroding the existing brotherly relations between Cyprus and Greece, the Cypriot government is hereby called upon to act quickly and effectively for the immediate delivery of the files,” he said.

He said the files must be brought into the hands of Cyprus’ authorities and added that their continued retention by Greece “constitutes a crime”.

He also pointed out that in the case of the Cyprus File, a set of documents which chart the events leading up to and during the coup which took place in Cyprus on July 15, 1974, sponsored by the Greek military junta of the day, an agreement was eventually reached between the governments of Greece and Cyprus in 2016 for it to be returned to Cyprus.

“Just as in the case of the National Guard archives now, ‘national reasons’ were given as an excuse not to hand over the Cyprus File. These reasons turned out to be flimsy and non-existent,” he said.