Angelos Kyriakou spoke to the Cyprus News Agency about the murder of his uncle, Solomos Solomou, in August 1996, who was five years old when his uncle was murdered and attending kindergarten just 150 meters from the site of the cold-blooded execution.

Solomos Solomou was killed by Turkish fire from the occupied side when, after the funeral of his cousin, Tasos Isaac, he crossed the buffer zone and climbed a pole to lower the Turkish flag.

Tasos Isaac had lost his life three days earlier, on August 11, 1996, when during an anti-occupation motorcycle protest he was surrounded and lynched to death inside the neutral zone in front of UN peacekeepers and television crews.

The last meeting

As he tells of how he emotionally received the murder, Mr Kyriakou is shocked: “From then on I started climbing up the flagpole at school.”

“At that time, Solomos was staying at our house. I remember when my father came to pick us up from kindergarten and on the way home we saw my uncle in the street. My father honked at him and asked him where he was going, to which Solomos replied that he was taking the babies home and ‘it’s my job’,” recalls Angelos Kyriakou.

However, he continued, “when we got home we heard on the radio that someone had been killed. After five minutes they called my father and asked him to go to Famagusta General Hospital because they had killed Solomos. At that time my mother was at work and my father called her and told her that they hit your brother Solomos in the leg and we are going to see him at the hospital. My mother had a special relationship with Salmon and she felt that something bad happened.”

Describing what happened at the hospital, Solomon’s nephew says that “as soon as we arrived at the hospital a cousin of my mother’s told her he was sorry. This is what I remember vividly from that day and we must be the last family in Cyprus to have experienced the brutality of the Turks.”

Asked about the treatment the families of Solomos and Isaac received from the state, he replied that “the state respected, respects and still respects the families of the two heroes.”

Asked what he feels 29 years after the death of his uncle, Angelos replied that “what we wish is that other families do not feel what we felt, we do not want anyone to relive everything we went through. It makes us nervous when we hear that there will be protests at the barricades, because we remember the murder of Solomos and Isaac, which was a tragic event.”