Our View: Cyprus police again going after the messenger

There are times when the decisions and actions of the law enforcement authorities do not stand up to rational scrutiny. The visit, in the early hours of Easter Saturday, by police officers to the home and subsequently the office of lawyer Nikos Clerides, who had in the past represented ‘Sandy’ – the source of the allegations about a corrupt former supreme court judge – would fall into this category.

It was very difficult to understand the reasoning for the visit, with a search warrant, to Clerides’ house considering he was neither a suspect nor a complainant in the case. It was not as if he had refused to cooperate with the authorities, having, a few days earlier, spent seven hours at a police station telling officers what he knew about the case.

Was he being investigated for the dissemination of fake news? This would not make sense either as it was journalist Makarios Drousiotis who had published the allegations about the judicial corruption and rape of a teenager, among other things. Clerides, subsequently, spoke publicly about the case but could this have justified the confiscation of his laptop and mobile phone? Deputy attorney-general Savvas Angelides, according to Clerides’ lawyer who had complained about the matter, gave assurances that police will look at nothing other than information related to the case.

Clerides claimed on Tuesday that although police had told him they would keep his phone for some hours, they had not returned it four days later. This fueled speculation on social media that the police might delete vital information about the case from his phone and laptop. Worse still, there were claims that the police were on a cover-up mission, on instructions from the politicians.

Nobody could say with any degree of certainty that this was the case, but the optics supported it. The police were investigating the lawyer who had the key witness in the case as a client, rather than the latter. It was a similar approach to the one adopted in the case of videogate. Instead of the police investigating the allegations of corrupt practices made by the associates of the president, their main concern was to find out who produced the video. And in the ‘Sandy’ case, the police were going after the messenger.

Admittedly, the allegations made were broad and had to be properly investigated before the police brought in any of those named by ‘Sandy’ for questioning. Whether these serious allegations are investigated is another matter. So far, the police have shown a greater inclination towards dismissing the allegations as fake or fabricated than mounting the serious investigation the president promised just a few days ago.