Thieves opened the grave of former Cypriot president Tassos Papadopoulos during the night and stole his corpse in a crime that shocked the Mediterranean island on Friday.
State television interrupted its normal programming through the morning to bring live reports and reaction to the desecration.
The official Cyprus News Agency (CNA) said the open grave had been discovered by a member of Papadopoulos’s guard, who lights a vigil candle in the cemetery in Deftera, just outside the capital, every morning.
On hearing the news, Papadopoulos’s family went to the cemetery, which has been cordoned off by police.
Police chief Michalis Papageorgiou, assistant police chief Andreas Iatropoulos and Nicosia police director Kypros Michaelides were all at the grave to oversee the investigation.
The crime came the day before a memorial service was due to be held to mark the first anniversary of Papadopoulos’s death. Sources cited by CNA said the service at the church of St Nicholas in Deftera was still expected to go ahead.
The current leader of Papadopoulos’s centre-right Diko party, Marios Garoyan, condemned what he called a ”heinous and terrible crime.”
Andros Kyprianou, head of the communist Akel party that leads the island’s government, expressed outrage.
”I don’t know what kind of people would create such a terrible crime and steal a corpse,” he said. ”There’s nothing for me to say.”
There was no immediate comment from the family of Papadopoulos, whose son, Nicholas, is a himself a prominent politician.
Papadopoulos served as president from 2003 to 2008 and led Greek Cypriots in rejecting a United Nations plan to reunify the divided island in a 2004 referendum.
Turkish Cypriots backed the plan in a simultaneous vote, but the plan failed and a divided island joined the European Union the same year.
Papadopoulos was defeated in the February 2008 election by the Akel candidate, current President Demetris Christofias. A lifelong heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer at the age of 74 later the same year.
Hundreds of mourners attended his funeral in December 2008, including then-Greek prime minister Costas Karamanlis and foreign minister Dora Bakoyianni.
”Tassos Papadopoulos has been a prominent figure of the Greeks of Cyprus, whom he served with passion and devotion. Our cooperation was excellent,” Karamanlis said in his message of condolence.
Christofias paid tribute to his long-time political sparring partner as a man of principle. ”He never hesitated to express his views, irrespective of what public opinion and the majority supported,” he said.
As a young man, Papadopoulos was a key member of the political wing of the EOKA guerrilla group that fought to end British colonial rule when the dream of union with Greece was thwarted.
He voted against the Zurich-London agreement which paved the way for independence but nevertheless served as one of four representatives of the Greek Cypriot side who drafted the island’s post-independence constitution.
In his mid-20s he became the government’s youngest minister, under the wing of his mentor, Archbishop Makarios, who was president from independence in 1960 until his death in 1977.
Papadopoulos held Cabinet posts for 12 years as minister of interior, finance, labour, health and agriculture, and also served as the interlocutor in bicommunal talks with the Turkish Cypriots in 1976. — Sapa-AFP