Police in Cyprus yesterday said they had arrested three people in connection with the theft last December of the corpse of the late President Tassos Papadopoulos. The arrests came one day after the body was found in a different Nicosia cemetery than the one in which the late president had been buried.

According to local press reports, one of the three suspects is an Indian national who has implicated a Cypriot national serving a life sentence in the island’s jail.

Earlier yesterday Panikos Kyriakou, the former warden of the island’s jail, had said that there might be truth in rumors that the crime had been planned by a life-term convict aiming to blackmail authorities into reducing his sentence.

Justice Minister Loukas Louka said that the late president’s relatives, who positively identified the body, had been advised by police not to pay a ransom demand. Later yesterday the family denied receiving any such demand.