FORMER foreign minister Marcos Kyprianou said yesterday that he had been assured that it was safe for Cyprus to keep the Iranian munitions cargo that was confiscated and stored at a naval base in Mari before the containers exploded in July 2011.
Kyprianou - one of six defendants in the ongoing trial over the death of 13 people who were killed by the blast - was being cross-examined by the state prosecution.
Kyprianou said that soon after Cyprus seized the munitions in early 2009 from the Cypriot-flagged Monchegorsk that was going from Iran to Syria, in violation of a UN security council resolutions, Colonel Georgios Georgiades was “reassuring” about the safety aspects of keeping the cargo in Cyprus, mentioning only that four of the 98 containers were “somewhat dangerous”.
Georgiades “was reassuring that the cargo was not dangerous. I remember very well that he said gunpowder burns but does not explode, and he never said there was any danger or problem and we should do something,” Kyprianou told the court.
Georgiades has testified in the trial as a prosecution witness.
Kyprianou denied the prosecution’s suggestion that he was trying to blame the army and Georgiades of failing to take safety precautions, saying that while keeping the cargo in Cyprus was a political decision, things could have changed if the situation had been presented differently to him.
By August 2009, Kyprianou’s instructions were to hold on to the cargo and maintain the status quo due to the upcoming meetings between President Demetris Christofias and Syria’s Bashir al-Assad, Kyprianou said.
He also denied acting on his own accord without permission by then president Demetris Christofias.
“You are trying to get the president of Republic out of the picture for your own reasons. I was only relaying the position of the chief of state with whom I agreed,” Kyprianou told the prosecution.
Kyprianou also denied giving a timeframe for holding on to the cargo, or for having any reason to recommend the cargo’s destruction.
“There was never an issue of keeping the cargo for a short amount of time. Temporary storage meant indefinite (storage) i.e. until the political situation requiring the confiscation and storage of the cargo in Cyprus changed,” Kyprianou said.
Seven sailors and six fire fighters were killed in the munitions’ explosion.
The trial’s defendants are Kyprianou, former defence minister Costas Papacostas, former national guard deputy chief Savvas Argyrou, former fire service chief Andreas Nicolaou; deputy fire chief Charalambos Charalambous; and former disaster response squad (EMAK) commander Andreas Loizides. They are charged with causing death by want of precaution, and homicide by gross negligence in relation to the deaths of the 13 people.