Cyprus’s Committee for Missing Persons to investigate Turkey mass grave report

The Committee for Missing Persons (CMP) in Cyprus has said it will investigate a report in a Turkish-Cypriot newspaper claiming that Greek-Cypriot prisoners had been buried alive during the 1974 Turkish invasion.

According to the report, published in Afrika daily on Thursday, an unidentified number of Greek Cypriots arrested during the invasion were taken to Adana, Turkey, where they were buried alive near a river.

“We will investigate this new information and classify it under the case file on mass graves,”Nestoras Nestoros, a Greek Cypriot representative to CMP, told local media.

The CMP has been carrying out exhumations at various sites since 2006.

Some 2,000 people are missing, most of them Greek Cypriots who disappeared in the invasion which followed a brief Greek-inspired coup. Several hundred Turkish Cypriots disappeared in inter-communal conflict in the years before the invasion.