Following the confessions of Sedat Peker, one of the mafia leaders used by the Turkish state in the war against Kurds, the unsolved murders in Cyprus are on the agenda again.
In mid 1990’s newspaper buildings, cars of politicians and journalists were bombed, party buildings were attacked with gunfire in Cyprus and many people were either killed or tortured.
One of the names of those killed by Turkey on the island was Theofilos Georgiadis, the President of the Cyprus Kurdistan Solidarity Committee. Georgiadis, who was targeted by bullets in front of his house on the evening of 20th March 1994 while he was the Chairman of the Cyprus Kurdistan Solidarity Committee, is now an important symbol of the joint struggle of the Hellenic peoples and the Kurds.
While studying at the Faculty of Political Sciences at Panteion University in Athens, Georgiadis met with the freedom struggle of the Kurdish people.
Due to his knowledge of Turkish, Georgiadis was appointed as spokesperson of the Turkish desk at the Press and Information Office in the Republic of Cyprus in 1986. In 1988, he established the Committee for Solidarity with Kurdistan, and with his enormous efforts, the newspaper “Voice of Kurdistan” was published in Greek.
Theofilos Georgiadis, who had been the target of the Turkish intelligence MIT since this time, received regular death threats signed by the “Turkish Revenge Brigades” by mail and telephone.
While he was preparing for the Kurdish new year celebrations of Newroz, he was targeted and shot with 5 bullets fired from a gun in front of his house on Thukydidou Street in Aglantzia District of Nicosia on the evening of 20 March 1994.
It was revealed that sometime before the incident, a Turkish secret government agent called Abdullah Çatlı had contacted Andreas Aristodimos, the leader of the drug gang, known as “Giouroukis”, to find an assassin on the island. This gang leader ordered his own brother Kypros Aristodimos to kill Georgiadis.
A few months after the murder, in June 1994, Aristodimos was also and suspiciously found dead near the town of Limassol.
In April 1995, the file was closed due to the deaths of all the names involved in the murder.
The name of Theofilos Georgiadis, is now regarded as one of the symbols of the joint struggle between the Hellenic and Kurdish peoples and was given as the name for the Kurdish cultural centre established on the island.
