So now we’re supposed to believe that prisons aren’t the lair of crime where locked-up criminals orchestrate murders, rape vulnerable inmates, blackmail prosecutors, control the drugs trade, and generally run the underworld—and, in many respects, the upper world as well. We’re supposed to change our minds and accept that prisons weren’t Sodom and Gomorrah now, but some years ago.
That the era presented as the most peaceful period in the correctional institution’s history—with two women at the helm who were being lauded from all quarters for the miracle they’d pulled off—was anything but. These two women were diabolical, drowning in personal obsessions they couldn’t control. That’s what we’re supposed to believe.
But how is it that for eight years, whilst they were at the wheel, nobody caught a whiff of the Sodom and Gomorrah unfolding?
Were these two women so clever and so diabolical that no one dared cross them? Did they manage to fool everyone—from the parade of different ministers who came and went, right through to Netflix, which featured Cyprus’s prisons (of that era) in a documentary series presenting a model institution?
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, as the officer Marcellus cries out in Shakespeare’s play, unable to explain what’s happening around him. We’re saying the same thing. Something deeply rotten is going on for this war of mutual destruction to drag on for so many years—yet we can’t explain it. And this rot is spreading everywhere.
Anna Aristotelous and Athena Demetriou are being called upon to prove they’re not elephants. Or are they? The doubt now hangs over their heads. From the moment they reported Michalis Katsounotos for contact with a convicted criminal, a war broke out that shows no sign of abating. And just when you think it’s over, something new emerges. Something new even more unthinkable. And the more one side counterattacks, the more the other brings fresh evidence to light. The more one rises, the more the other strikes. Witnesses and stories appear that not only stoke the fire to keep it burning but torpedo everything in sight.
But this isn’t a personal vendetta. It’s about extremely serious crimes, about convicted criminals, about corruption, about people in important public posts whom you no longer know if you can trust. All of this touches and corrodes trust in the security forces and in justice itself. How far will it go? Who’s in charge?
