Cyprus serial killer: Child's body found in lake believed to be seventh victim

Remains thought to be six-year-old girl whose mother was murdered last year

Police in Cyprus have found the body of a girl believed to be the seventh and final victim of a serial killer who preyed on foreign women for two years without detection.

Detectives said the child’s decomposing remains were pulled out of Lake Memi, southwest of the capital Nicosia, where they had been looking for six-year-old Sierra Tiburcio, whose mother was murdered last year.

“Human remains have been found and forensic pathologists are on the scene,” a police spokesperson said.

The girl’s body was found among reeds on Wednesday, wrapped in a bed sheet and tied by rope to a cement block at a depth of 6m (20ft).

A 35-year-old Greek Cypriot army captain, Nikos Metaxas, has been in custody since late April on suspicion of killing five adult women and the young daughters of two of the victims.

Police said the suspect had provided written confessions to the murders and had pointed investigators to the exact spot in the lake, a former copper pyrite mine near the village of Xiliatos, where he had dumped Sierra’s body.

Most of the adult victims, who met their killer online, were employed as housekeepers in Cyprus and disappeared between September 2016 and August 2018.

The case, one of the worst peacetime atrocities in Cyprus, has triggered outrage and horror on an island where serious crime is relatively rare.

The country’s police chief was sacked and its justice minister resigned following accounts of bungled investigations by officers who did not take the women’s disappearances seriously because they were foreign.

Police had been scouring Lake Memi for weeks in search of the daughter of 38-year-old Marry Rose Tiburcio, from the Philippines, who was found dead by tourists at a flooded mine shaft in April.

Tiburcio, who disappeared with daughter Sierra in May last year, had been in a six-month relationship with the suspect and was the first of the victims to be found dead.

The body of Arian Palanas Lozano, 28, also from the Philippines, was discovered in the same shaft six days later.

Livia Florentina Bunea, 38, from Romania, and her eight-year-old daughter Elena, were found dead in suitcases at the bottom of a toxic lake referred to locally as the Red Lake. Their funerals were due to be held in Cyprus on Thursday.

Another body, believed to belong to Ahita Khadka Bista from Nepal, was found down a dry well in a military firing range.

The Cyprus government said it would cover the costs of the victims’ burials.

Mr Metaxas, who has not yet been formally charged, is due to appear in court on Friday.