A memorial service and inauguration of a memorial bench will take place on Sunday in remembrance of the seven foreign women and girls who were murdered by serial killer, Nikos Metaxas.
The memorial will take place on Sunday, November 10 at 12:30 in Armonia park, Ayios Tychonas Limassol.
The memorial is organised by AGAPI, a volunteer organisation that helps the needy in Limassol and gives social advice to migrants. All of Metaxas’ victims were non-Cypriots.
Elizabeth Haslam, one of the organisers, said many people are getting involved in the memorial.
‘‘Some are attached to the police who have been particularly helpful and will be represented at the ceremony,’’ she said. During the investigations the police had come under heavy criticism for not taking the initial reports of the women going missing seriously.
The mayor of Ayios Tychonas gave the organisation permission to erect the bench at the Armonia park.
She also mentioned that the ceremony is happening now due to a delay from last year when they were hoping it would happen.
Metaxas, the serial killer, admitted to murdering five foreign women and two girls who were daughters of two of the victims who went missing between 2016 and 2018.
The first body was found by accident in a mine shaft at Mitsero on April 14, 2019.
The second body was found there a couple of days later and the third one was found near a firing range in Orounta on April 25, 2019. Three other bodies, one of them stuffed in a suitcase, were dumped in Mitsero’s ‘red lake’.
The last body to be retrieved was of a little girl, on July 12, 2019. She had been wrapped in a sheet and thrown into the Xyliatos lake, weighed down by a concrete block.
Metaxas was sentenced in June 2019 to five consecutive life sentences for the premeditated murder of the five women and two concurrent life sentences for the murder of the two girls.
