By Constantinos Psillides<\/p>\n
A car belonging to lawyer and former politician Michalis Papapetrou, 68, was destroyed by fire at around 1am on Tuesday, according to police.<\/p>\n
A police spokesman told the Cyprus Mail the fire was set deliberately.<\/p>\n
The BMW was parked outside Papapetrou\u2019s home in Nicosia. The damage is estimated to be around \u20ac50,000.<\/p>\n
Papapetrou had previously told daily Politis that his car had electrical issues and that a \u00a0short-circuit might be responsible for the fire.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went home at around 6pm on Monday, parked my car in the garage and didn\u2019t leave for the rest of the day. At around 1.30am my wife, who has a better sense of smell than me, told me that something was wrong. We went to the veranda and saw the car burning like an Easter candle,\u201d recounted Papapetrou.<\/p>\n
Asked on the arsonist\u2019s possible motive, Papapetrou responded that it might have something to do with him crossing over to the North Cyprus on Sunday.<\/p>\n
\u201cA friend of mine suggested that I became a target because on Sunday I went to the other side to congratulate the new Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci on his victory. I wish that this is not the case,\u201d said Papapetrou<\/p>\n
Papapetrou has a long history in Cyprus politics.<\/p>\n
He was elected to parliament in 1985 representing AKEL, which he left five years later to found his own party, ADISOK. The party had a short life span as it merged with United Democrats in 1996.<\/p>\n
Papapetrou was also government spokesman in the Glafcos Clerides administration, from 1999 to 2003.<\/p>\n
Papapetrou also backed the \u2018Yes\u2019 campaign in the 2004 Annan plan referendum, a decision for which he was heavily criticized in the past.<\/p>\n
(Cyprus Mail, April 29, 2015)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Constantinos Psillides A car belonging to lawyer and former politician Michalis Papapetrou, 68, was destroyed [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pio.mfa.gov.ct.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}