Editor’s note: This article is drawn from publicly reported accounts — press coverage from outlets including the BBC, The Guardian, and AFP, court reporting, and statements attributed to officials. It is presented as reported, not as established fact.
A body in the shaft
On April 14, 2019, after unusually heavy rainfall, tourists near the village of Mitsero spotted something grim: a body brought to the surface of an abandoned mine shaft by the floodwater. The dead woman was Mary Rose Tiburcio, a Filipina domestic worker who had been missing. What investigators found when they pulled at that thread, according to press reporting, would make this the worst serial-killing case in the history of Cyprus.
Within four days of the discovery, police arrested Nikos Metaxas, a 35-year-old Greek Cypriot army captain. According to reporting by AFP carried by Pulse Kenya, Metaxas had pleaded guilty to seven premeditated murders — five foreign women and two of their young daughters — carried out between September 2016 and the summer of 2018. A panel of three judges at the Nicosia Criminal Court handed him seven life sentences of 25 years each, five of them to run consecutively: the harshest penalty ever imposed in Cypriot legal history, and the first time any defendant had faced seven counts of premeditated murder.
How he found his victims
According to the BBC, The Guardian, and court reporting summarized in our source material, Metaxas met his victims on the dating site Badoo. His targets were drawn from one of the most vulnerable populations on the island: migrant domestic workers, mostly from the Philippines, Romania, and Nepal, women who had come to Cyprus for housekeeping and menial work. Cyprus is a prime destination for such migrants from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, AFP noted.
The identified victims included Tiburcio and her six-year-old daughter Sierra, and Livia Florentina Bunea, a Romanian woman, and her eight-year-old daughter Elena. Metaxas, according to the judges’ ruling as seen by AFP, had “embarked on a campaign to kill defenceless women.”
The Red Lake
After his arrest, Metaxas directed investigators to the places where he had dumped the bodies — including a toxic lake near the capital Nicosia, known as the Red Lake. Authorities spent weeks dredging it with help from Israeli and British experts before recovering the remains, AFP reported. Police recovered three suitcases containing bodies from the lake, and divers later found the body of a child — believed to be the killer’s seventh and final victim — wrapped in a carpet with a cement block attached to it, according to the court account reported by Pulse Kenya. Six other bodies had been recovered from various sites.
The killings had gone undetected for nearly three years. Women went missing, reports were filed, and little happened. That delay would become the second scandal of the case.
“Tortured by memories”
Metaxas wrote a handwritten confession running some ten pages, according to our source material. Led into a Nicosia courtroom under heavy security, he stared grimly at the ground as a prosecutor read out a long string of charges — kidnapping and the killings of the women and two of their daughters — and pleaded guilty to each, one by one, holding back tears, AFP reported.
After the prosecution’s account, he read a short handwritten statement apologizing to his victims. “I acknowledge my guilt,” he said in a shaky voice, according to the report. “I apologise to the families of the victims and to the souls of the victims.” He said he was “tortured by memories” and could not explain why he had carried out the killings: “Cypriot society will be wondering how one of its members reached this point. I have also asked myself why; I have not yet managed to find an answer,” he said. “I have committed hateful crimes.” He is not expected to appeal, the report added.
The institutional failure
The case detonated Cyprus’s law-enforcement establishment. Relatives and friends of the five women accused authorities of neglect over the missing-persons cases, and protesters accused the police of racism, saying the searches had been botched because the missing women were foreigners, AFP reported. The police’s failure to follow up on reports of women going missing sparked outrage — and led to the dismissal of the police chief and the resignation of the justice minister.
President Nicos Anastasiades publicly criticised the police for “apparent negligence and dereliction of duty” and acknowledged that better initial investigations could have prevented some of the killings, according to the report. The government agreed to cover the funeral costs of all seven victims and to pay 17,000 euros to each surviving child of the victims.
It was the part of the story that made the Red Lake murders about more than one predator. A Greek Cypriot army captain had used a dating site to select migrant women whom he believed no one would come looking for — and for nearly three years, the institutions proved him right.
Disclosure: This article is based on publicly reported accounts — press and court reporting cited above, including AFP reporting carried by Pulse Kenya — and is not stated as established fact. Claims are attributed to the outlets, officials, and witnesses named in the text. Nikos Metaxas pleaded guilty and was sentenced as described; the institutional-failure claims reflect the reporting and statements of officials and protesters, not findings stated as fact here.
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