NICOSIA, Jan 7 (AFP) - Foreign experts have begun a search in the north of the divided island for possible mass graves of Greek Cypriots missing since the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, officials said Friday.
Experts with the Britain-based International Forensic Centre of Excellence for the Investigation of Genocide (INFORCE) began digging in the north Nicosia suburb of Trachonas earlier this week.
UN spokeswoman Major Ingrid Tomakova told AFP "digging will continue until next Wednesday but nothing has been found yet. These are exploratory digs to see if anything is there."
Trachonas was one of three locations Turkish Cypriot authorities identified in 1998 as possible mass burial sites.
If a mass grave is found, the UN-sponsored tripartite Committee of Missing Persons (CMP) will decide on what steps to take and INFORCE would carry out any exhumations that follow.
The highly charged "missing" issue has been a major obstacle to solving the decades-long Cyprus problem.
Greek Cypriot officials have identified 18 sites in the south that are believed to contain the remains of Turkish Cypriots killed in 1974 when Turkish forces invaded the island after an Athens-backed coup aimed at uniting Cyprus with Greece.
Speaking of the search, Cypriot government spokesman Kypros Chrysostomides told reporters that "if there is any progress, that would be a positive step in the right direction to establishing the fate of the missing. There has been no concrete result so far."
He criticised the Turkish side for dragging its feet on the issue for so long and for not investigating even one individual case where there were eye-witness accounts.
He said Turkey has yet to comply with a May 2001 European Court of Human Rights ruling ordering it to investigate some 1,479 cases of Greek Cypriots who disappeared after last being seen alive in Turkish custody.
The CMP, comprising one representative from each side and a UN envoy, has the files of those 1,479 Cypriots listed as missing.
01/07/2005 17:38 GMT - AFP