Minister cleared over dumped state secrets
A police investigation into how top-secret Cypriot state documents came to be found dumped in garbage bags outside a government building last month has exonerated the head of a ministry involved, Nicosia said yesterday. Making public the report, government spokesman Kypros Chrysostomides said Education Minister Pefkios Georgiadis bore no blame as he had not known the documents – that were marked «Education Ministry» – existed. The papers, which were found in late July by a Cypriot journalist and handed over to the authorities, concerned highly sensitive military and security issues. Their discovery sparked an intense row between President Tassos Papadopoulos’s government, which took over at the end of February, and its predecessor. Chrysostomides laid the blame on lower-level ministry employees. The papers had been destined for destruction.
