A Nicosia man who killed his neighbour’s cat by repeatedly hitting it on the head with a blunt object was sent straight to prison on Friday after the Court of Appeal ruled that his sentence should not have been suspended.
According to the ruling, the man then threw the cat into a rubbish bin, where it died. The killing took place on 5 August 2021.
He had been sentenced to two months in prison, suspended for three years. More than five years after the killing, the Court of Appeal ordered him to serve the sentence immediately, and he is being taken to the Central Prison.
The court agreed with the prosecution that the sentence should not have been suspended. It found that the lower court had relied on the same mitigating factors both to set the sentence and to suspend it, which it cannot do, and that neither the circumstances of the case nor the man’s personal circumstances justified suspension. Suspending the sentence “would not reflect the objective seriousness of the offence”, the judges said.
The case was heard by judges Michalis Ambizas, Stella Christodoulidou-Messiou and Ifigenia Stylianidou. Elena Konstantinou represented the prosecution.
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