Sitting President Demetris Christofias, the successor (and past political rival) of Tasso Papadopoulos, was livid. Speaking from Brussels, where he was attending a European Council summit, Christofias called the theft “a sacrilege,” as the BBC reported at the time. “This is an unacceptable, unholy, unethical and condemnable act that damages our tradition, our culture and our respect toward the dead.”
Papadopoulos (seen above) had been a controversial figure in Cyprus. Educated in London at a time when his home country was still under British colonial rule, Papadopoulos returned to Cyrpus to join the independence movement as a member of the Cypriot resistance effort (via Britannica). He negotiated the terms of Cyprus’ independence in 1960 and remained a force in the island’s politics, rejecting a UN proposal for the island’s unification and developing a reputation for anti-Turkish prejudice, one which he himself repudiated. (Northern Cyprus, which is ethnically Turkish, remains independent from the Greek-dominated European Republic.) He died on December 12, 2008, and in what many speculated was not a coincidence, his body was stolen on December 11, 2009, shortly before a planned memorial service, per The Guardian.
However, the stealing of Papadopoulos’ corpse did not seem politically motivated. As Reuters reported in 2010, a ransom was purportedly the impetus behind the crime. However, the Papadopoulos family, along with the Cypriot government, both made contradictory claims. Reuters noted that family members said they’d had no contact with anyone, while the government stated the motive was financial, but no money had changed hands.
