This week in history
THIS week in history last year, the son of the head of the Prime Ministry’s Fight Against Drugs Commission was arrested on suspicion of smuggling cannabis across the “Green Line”. Efsane Karaokçu, 20, was one of four young men arrested at the Lokmacı checkpoint. He appeared before Lefkoşa District Court along with Ezel İsmail Süerman, 20, Yüksel Çakan, 22, and Berk Balkanlar, 19. Police who swooped at 11.30pm after a tip-off to the Narcotics and Anti-Smuggling Unit said the group were found to have 28 grammes of a substance believed to be cannabis inside a takeaway burger carton.
Also this week in 2017, a damning European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) verdict on a 12-year-old triple murder in South Cyprus should have been a wake-up call for cross-border crime-fighting, a leading lawyer signalled. Hakkı Önen, TRNC representative on the Bicommunal Technical Committee on Crime, was speaking in the wake of the ECHR judgement which slammed the governments in South Nicosia and Ankara for failing to cooperate to bring the killers of Turkish Cypriot Elmas Güzelyurtlu, his wife Zerrin and their 15-year-old daughter to justice.
This week in 2013, it was reported that a journey from Girne to the Karpaz would take just 15 minutes if Girne American University (GAU) plans for an “air taxi” service went ahead. The $5 million project, seen as bringing the remote peninsula to the “doorstep” of the TRNC’s main towns, would allow a fleet of land and sea planes to take visitors to various locations around the country. GAU founding rector and Chancellor Serhat Akpınar told Cyprus Today that a budget had been allocated for the project, which would be used for teaching purposes in addition to passenger transport.
This week in 2009, former late President Rauf Denktaş claimed that the CIA wanted him dead before elections in 1981. He was speaking out against claims that the shadowy Ergenekon organisation believed to be behind a coup d’etat allegedly being planned against the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey had intervened in North Cyprus elections.
This week in 1998, a bust of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was vandalised and a Turkish flag stolen from the playground of the Turkish junior school in the village of Pile, the only mixed Turkish and Greek Cypriot community on the island. Former United Nations spokesman Waldemar Rokoszewski confirmed that the Atatürk statue had been sprayed with blue paint.
On this very day, April 7, 1978, the controversial neutron bomb developed by the USA was put on the back-burner. The bomb — properly called an Enhanced Radiation Weapon or ERW — was a specialised thermonuclear device which produced a minimal blast but released large amounts of lethal radiation. Jimmy Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, changed US policy and gave the order for the production of neutron warheads to start in 1981.
On April 11, 1981, the arrest of a black man led to hundreds of youths rampaging through the streets of Brixton in south London. They hurled petrol bombs at police, burnt cars and looted shops in an outbreak of violence. Nearly 300 police officers and 65 civilians were injured during three days of rioting in Brixton.