The five defendants in the private prosecution brought by the family of Thanasis Nicolaou pleaded not guilty on Tuesday, and the court rejected the defence’s preliminary objections, sending the case to trial. Hearings are set for November 10 to 13 and November 23 to 27.
They are forensic pathologist Panikos Stavrianos, former Limassol police director Andreas Iatropoulos and former head of Limassol CID Nikos Sofokleous. They also include Christakis Nathanael, former head of the rural police division, and Christakis Kapiliotis, the former head of the Platres cluster of police stations.
Tuesday marked 21 years since the death of Nicolaou, a 26-year-old National Guardsman. In a post marking the anniversary, his mother, Andriana Nicolaou, said the family was doing “what the State and the Law Office should have done. These days are always difficult and, as a family, we dedicate them to his memory, because Thanasis was always close to the Church.”
Preliminary objections
At the start of Tuesday’s hearing, the court rejected the final preliminary objection by the defence lawyers, which sought the dismissal of the revised charge sheet.
Before the court moved on to scheduling the case, Kapiliotis applied to enter a special plea and give evidence under Article 61(a) of the Criminal Procedure Law, challenging the court’s jurisdiction. He argued that the acts in the charge sheet were disciplinary offences, not criminal ones.
In a separate preliminary objection, filed before he was called to plead, Kapiliotis cited Article 69(1)(a) of the Criminal Procedure Law (Cap. 155) and asked the court to dismiss the charge sheet for what he said was a lack of jurisdiction. He then pleaded not guilty.
In his objection, he argued that “the attempt by the private prosecutors to artfully turn any service or administrative matters (possible disciplinary offences) from 2005 into criminal offences, by invoking Article 134 of the Criminal Code, without even a trace of evidence of subjective intent or intention to cover up, directly contravenes the Constitution, specifically Article 12(1).”
He also claimed that, when filing the charge sheet, the private prosecutors had concealed two official Law Office letters, which he said had already been submitted to the court as exhibits. In his view, the letters showed there was no evidence and no intent, which he argued made the proceedings an abuse of process.
One, according to Kapiliotis, was a seven-page letter dated June 11, 2025, from the Attorney General to the Nicolaou family’s lawyer, Nikos Clerides, stating that no prosecutions would go ahead. The other was a five-page Law Office letter dated June 14, 2023, to Andriana Nicolaou’s then lawyer, Christos M. Triantafyllides, which also concerned not pursuing prosecutions.
Kapiliotis also submitted as an exhibit a USB stick containing excerpts from an interview Attorney General Giorgos Savvides gave to ANT1 news director Elli Kotziamani, as well as an interview he gave to Andreas Kimitris on RIK.
He also referred to a sum of around 130,000 euros which, he said, the family had received from the Republic.
Private prosecutors respond
The private prosecutors, represented by lawyers Nikos Clerides and Alexandros Clerides, said Kapiliotis’s application was an abuse of process and that the same issue had already been raised before the court at an earlier stage.
Nikos Clerides said the sum the family received was much smaller than presented and related to legal costs from earlier court proceedings.
