New documents published by Phileleftheros on Thursday deepen questions about the conduct of Police Chief Themistis Arnaoutis during his tenure as commander of Pera Chorio police station between 2012 and 2013, when he was responsible for handling domestic violence complaints involving the family of 15-year-old Stylianos.
The documents, obtained by Phileleftheros in connection with the ongoing inquest into Stylianos’s suicide in Kotsiatis in 2019, indicate an inconsistency between Arnaoutis’s handling of complaints during his time as station commander and instructions he later issued to police officers on the same subject.
Independent criminal investigators Modestos Pogiatzis and Andreas Andreou had previously recommended in their report that Arnaoutis, then station commander, be prosecuted for neglect of duty. Their finding was based on his failure to act on a complaint filed on March 11, 2013, at a time when a 2007 Police Chief circular required adequate investigation of such complaints.
“Paragraph closed”
The March 11, 2013 complaint was filed by Stylianos’s mother, who went to the police station and reported that her husband had pushed and slapped her after animals died at the farm he kept in Kotsiatis. The complaint was logged but no further action followed. In the relevant entry, held by Phileleftheros, after the details of the complaint are recorded, the officer who handled it noted: “DAILY LOG PARAGRAPH CLOSED.”
This is the complaint in respect of which independent criminal investigators recommended Arnaoutis be prosecuted, as Phileleftheros reported on Wednesday.
“Strict compliance”
Three years later, on March 15, 2016, Arnaoutis — by then serving as Assistant Director of Operations and Support at the Police HQ Crime Combating Department — circulated an internal memo calling on officers to carry out full investigations of such complaints.
The memo explicitly stated that officers must exhaust all available means and must not stand down even when complainants do not wish to proceed. The document forms part of the case file.
The memo called for “strict compliance and implementation” of procedures that, the source notes, had not been followed by members of the station Arnaoutis had commanded three years earlier.
In his statement to the independent criminal investigators on September 21, 2020, Arnaoutis declined to answer 31 of the 32 questions put to him.
In his answer to the sole question he responded to, he indicated his belief that he had handled the complaints adequately as station commander.
He referred to two of the four complaints made to the station in total, and made no reference to the March 11, 2013 complaint — the one for which his prosecution was recommended.
