Cyprus' first serial killer breaks down while admitting murder of five women and two children

Nicos Metaxas gets seven life imprisonment terms after confessing to ‘abhorrent’ crimes

A Greek Cypriot army captain has been sentenced to seven life imprisonment terms after he pleaded guilty to killing five women and two children in a murder spree which authorities stumbled across by accident.

Nicos Metaxas, 35, admitted to the premeditated murder of his seven victims – who came from the Philippines, Romania and Nepal – between September 2016 and July 2018. The two children, aged six and eight, were daughters of two of the women.

The killer broke down in tears as he submitted guilty pleas to a total of 12 offences, including five abduction charges, in court on Monday. “I have committed abhorrent crimes,” he said. “I cannot go back in time and undo what I have done.”

The murders, believed to be the Cyprus’ first serial killer case, triggered outrage and horror on an island where serious crime is relatively rare, and also forced the resignation of the justice minister and the police chief.

Metaxas was wearing a bullet-proof vest and taken under heavy security to a courthouse in the capital Nicosia, appearing without a lawyer.

Reading from a prepared statement prior to his sentencing, he told a three-judge court panel that he “doesn’t have any clear answers” why he committed the killings and has “struggled” to figure out the “why and how”.

The 35-year-old said his cooperation with police investigators was “the least” he could do to ease the pain he had caused.

He also asked authorities for a scientific panel to interview him in order to delve into his psyche and find the reasons for his actions, referring to unspecified events in his past “decades ago” that he had been trying to forget.

Police at a flooded mineshaft near Nicosia where two female bodies were found in April (AP)

Police say Metaxas first met his victims online. The women were mostly employed as housekeepers on the island and disappeared over a period of almost two years.

The first victim was found dead by tourists taking pictures at a mining shaft in late April 2019, unravelling the macabre killing spree. The last victim discovered, the six-year-old child, was finally found in a lake in July.

A state prosecutor said six of the victims died of strangulation while the seventh died of a massive head injury.

The police chief was sacked and the justice minister resigned following accounts of bungled investigations by police, accused of failing to take the disappearances seriously because the women were foreign.

Additional reporting by agencies