Prosecutors reject bids to drop charges in prisons documents trial

The legal service will not agree to drop the charges against five defendants in the central prisons’ documents trial, prosecution lawyer Vasilis Bissas told the Nicosia criminal court on Friday. He said requests from defendants four to eight had been turned down, although attorney-general George Savvides could still review the decision. Second defendant, former deputy director of the central prisons, Athena Demetriou also told the court she had not received all the witness material. She cited gaps in investigators’ statements, search warrants and attachments, and said she believed the material had been held back because it helped the defence. Bissas said the witness material was handed over when the case was sent to court and that the legal service would hand over anything missing straight away if the defence named it. He asked why only Demetriou had raised the problem when the other defendants had received the material. Asked about the defence’s explanation for why it was not handed over, he said it was “not relevant to this case”. The trial resumes on October 29 at 9.30am, with eight defendents on trial, all of whom have pled not guilty. They are former prisons director Anna Aristotelous, her former deputy Demetriou, five prison staff and a former prison guard who is now a police officer. They face nine shared charges, including conspiracy to commit a felony and theft of state property. These cover 48,432 documents, 370 architectural plans of the prison and 431 items of digital data. They also face abuse of power charges over moving the material to the home of the chief warden. Aristotelous faces an extra charge of allowing classified documents to leak while she was director. The documents were reportedly taken out of the prison between November and December 2022, with police later seizing some 300,000 pages from the chief warden’s home. Aristotelous had reported that deputy police chief Michalis Katsounotos, a who was then head of the drug squad, had contacted a convicted prisoner to obtain compromising material of her and Demetriou. Katsounotos himself was never prosecuted; both women left the prisons in December 2022 and filed criminal complaints against him the following month.