Supermarket attacker handed single-day remand

The 31-year-old man who stabbed a woman multiple times at a supermarket in northern Nicosia was on Thursday brought before a court in northern Nicosia and remanded for a single day. He will as such next appear in court on Friday. The woman, named as 22-year-old Zhanerke Abdrazakova, remains in intensive care at northern Nicosia’s Dr Burhan Nalbantoglu hospital, with the hospital’s chief physician Hasan Birtan having told the north’s Tak news agency that she had been intubated and was in a critical condition. He said that her “life is still in danger”, after she sustained “multiple organ injuries” and “significant blood loss” as a result of the attack. Earlier, the north’s ‘interior minister’ Dursun Oguz had said that the man had arrived in Cyprus last Thursday, telling the north’s public broadcaster BRT that the man “came and went” and “entered via the Republic of Turkey like a normal tourist”. Oguz said the man had travelled to Cyprus on three previous occasions: in 2018, last year, and in February, and said as such that the incident should be addressed from a national security perspective, beyond its personal dimension”. Meanwhile, Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman had said that “violence against women constitutes a loss of civilisation”. “We need to move away from the normalisation and sensationalism, focusing on individual incidents and asking “who” and “why”, and instead focus on holistic policies to eliminate violence against women in particular, and all forms of violence in general,” he said, before adding that he was “saddened” by the incident. The incident occurred inside the Metropol supermarket in the suburb of Taskinkoy shortly before midday on Monday, with the man first stabbing the woman, and then stabbing himself. On Monday evening, the north’s ‘deputy parliament speaker’ Fazilet Ozdenefe, currently the highest-ranking Turkish Cypriot female politician, declared that “it is undeniable that we are facing a multifaceted safety problem”. “From rapidly changing demographics to immigration policies, from a lack of oversight to the government’s disregard for society’s safety concerns, we have serious problems which need to be discussed and solved,” she said. However, she added, “we must define each problem from the right perspective”. She added to this end that “to interpret today’s attack solely through the lens of the identity or origin of the perpetrator leads us to overlook the deep-rooted and structural cases of violence against women”. “Regardless of the perpetrator’s nationality, ethnicity, or social class, the male-dominated mentality which considers itself entitled to exert power and control over women knows no bounds,” she said, She added that “violence against women is neither unique to today nor to any particular social group”, and that “in this land, women have been targets of male violence and lost their lives in the past”. “We cannot make the women who were attacked in the past and their experiences invisible within a nostalgic narrative of safety. However, acknowledging the realities of the past should not mean ignoring the changes we are experiencing today,” she said.