No end in sight for teenager’s Cyprus nightmare
It was intended to be a sunsoaked working holiday, a rite of passage between finishing school and starting university. Instead, it turned into a nightmare. When a British teenager arrived in the party town of Ayia Napa in Cyprus in early July, her plan was to get a job, have fun and, in her own words, do some “growing up”.
Hoping to find work in a bar or handing out flyers for the resort’s nightclubs, the 18-year-old found accommodation at the two-star Pambos Napa Rocks Hotel in the heart of Ayia Napa.
The hotel, which packs in hundreds of young people each summer, is a short walk from neon signs offering “cheap booze” and a Flintstones-themed nightclub called the Bedrock Inn which has signs beckoning “girls on tour” and “lads on tour.”
But what happened in a room at the hotel in the early hours of July 17 changed her dreams of a carefree summer break into a bruising ordeal which shows no signs of ending soon.
The young woman from Derbyshire, who is now 19, claims that she was gang raped by a group of up to 12 Israelis who were staying in the hotel.
She says some of the young men filmed part of the encounter without her knowledge or consent. The video was later widely disseminated on social media, which the woman’s legal team have likened to “revenge porn”.
The young men, most of them in their teens, were arrested and remanded in custody. They insisted that whatever sex had taken place was entirely consensual.
The rape claim was a potential public relations disaster for Cyprus, which attracts around 1.3 million British tourists a year.
“A lot of British girls were told by their parents to cut short their holidays and fly home,” said a barmaid from Manchester in a bar called Gallianos, which was well known to the teenager in the rape case.
Ten days later, on the night of July 27, the woman was summoned to a police station where she signed a statement in which she retracted the gang rape allegations.
“They told me that if I did not sign the statement, they would arrest all my friends. Marios [the investigating officer] wanted me to write that it was all made up,” she told a Cypriot court this week.
Within hours, the charges against the Israelis were dropped and they flew home to a heroes’ welcome, popping bottles of champagne at Tel Aviv airport, embracing relatives and chanting “the Brit is a whore”.
Two of the video clips apparently showing the British woman having consensual sex with one of the Israelis subsequently went viral on social media and have been viewed, in the words of one Ayia Napa resident, by “the whole of Cyprus”.
Cypriot police face accusations that they dragged the retraction out of the teenager because they were under pressure to quash a gang rape trial that would have harmed Cyprus’s tourism industry and its strategic and commercial links with Israel.
The young woman was swiftly transformed from victim to accused. Immediately after signing the retraction, she was arrested and taken to a prison in Nicosia, where she spent more than a month sharing a cell with nine other women.
She is now on trial for causing public mischief by allegedly fabricating the rape claim. If convicted, she could go to prison for up to a year.
The alleged rough justice meted out to the teenager, a keen horse rider who has had to forgo her place at university this autumn, started when she was told she needed to come in for questioning on the night of July 27.
She told her mother, who had flown over from the UK, that she would be gone for half an hour for what she understood would be a routine chat.
Instead, she spent eight hours in police custody, in which she said she was threatened by police until she agreed to sign the retraction, which she claims was effectively dictated to her in poor English by a detective.
She claims she was denied access to a lawyer and an interpreter and after sending a series of frantic text messages to friends and family, had her phone confiscated.
She was denied a visit to the lavatory, she alleges, telling the court this week that officers made her wait five hours until she got to the jail in Nicosia.
“Police did not secure the scene of the alleged rape and they didn’t organise an identity parade for the teenager to identify her alleged attackers,” said Michael Polak, a British member of the woman’s legal team.
“Nor did they download the text messages that the Israelis sent to each other, which is shocking.
“That’s one of the first things you would have expected them to do. And there was no video recording of the night that the teenager signed the statement.”
“There was definitely a lot of pressure on the police; Cyprus survives on tourism,” said Mr Polak, the director of Justice Abroad, which helps Britons who find themselves in legal trouble overseas.
The Cypriot police strongly deny putting the young woman under undue pressure and say all the correct procedures were followed.
But women’s rights and civil society groups say the public mischief charge should be withdrawn. They say the investigation was mishandled and the trial is putting the woman through unnecessary humiliation, on top of the trauma of the alleged gang rape.
“It’s as if, every time she goes into court, she is raped again because of the media attention and the cameras,” said Elena Karaoli from the Cyprus Women’s Lobby.
Susana Pavlou, director of the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies in Nicosia, thinks the speed with which the charges against the Israelis were dropped is suspicious. “They were allowed to go home without even a slap on the wrist”, despite having circulated the clips of the British girl having sex.
“A lot of pressure was applied on Cyprus by the Israeli government,” said a source who has followed the case closely from day one but did not want to be named.
Diplomatic relations between Cyprus and Israel have grown particularly close in recent years, as Tel Aviv’s relations with Turkey cooled. The Israelis are co-operating with Cyprus in prospecting for natural gas and each year, around 230,000 Israeli tourists visit Cyprus.
This week the teenager’s trial was adjourned until Nov 1, when the court will hear from a British psychologist who diagnosed her as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
There will then be further hearings and the 19-year-old may be stuck on the island until at least Christmas .
The excitement and hope of her arrival on Cyprus four months ago must seem like a very distant memory.
‘It’s as if, every time she goes into court, she is raped again because of all the media attention and cameras’