On the 10th of April 2026 at 10.00 we gathered at the Nicosia Cemetery together with the relatives of a “missing person”, Reshat Ahmet whose remains had been found in a well in Troulli due to bicommunal cooperation… 62 years after he had gone “missing”, he would be buried in the Nicosia Cemetery, in the “Martyrs” Section where most of the “missing” Turkish Cypriots are being buried when their remains are found…
Reshat Ahmet’s burial site is a special case since the relative of missing Greek Cypriots, Xenis Challoumas, put a lot of effort to find it… It shows us that when there is bicommunal cooperation, we can in fact heal the wounds of our country… And the humanitarian work of Challoumas and Kallis is proof of this.
Xenis Challoumas whose family is from Tremetousia has two missing persons: His father and his uncle were abducted and killed and buried somewhere outside Tremetousia in 1974 by some Turkish Cypriots and we are still looking to find their burial site. The family of Challoumas had always very good relations with Turkish Cypriots, his father and his uncle always helped their co-villagers since they were running the Cooperative of the village and apparently, some Turkish Cypriots first asked for money of the cooperative, took it and then would take them outside the village and kill them… The area is rumoured to be between Tremetousia and Troulli and even though there has been witnesses and some excavations in the area, it produced no results so far…
Act of humanity
And despite his grave pain and suffering, Challoumas has been helping voluntarily, without expecting anything in return, as a humanitarian task, the search for the burial sites of missing persons. He has shown the burial site of the elderly missing persons from Petrofani village who had stayed in the village in 1974 and who were killed by some Greek Cypriots and thrown in a well… Their close relative, Ali Esendaghli too had investigated and we had gone together with him and Xenophon Kallis who was the Assistant to the Greek Cypriot Member of the Cyprus Missing Persons’ Committee and had shown this well to him. Ali’s father and uncle were missing from Petrofani and his grandmother had been killed in a very vicious way – she had been a very old woman with hundreds of bullets in her body when the UNFICYP had found her and took the body to the family who had fled to Louroudjina… The rest of the missing from Petrofani were buried in two wells by some Greek Cypriots and we had been looking for them. In one of the wells, one missing was found but in the second well we had shown, somehow the remains had not been found and we were really surprised by this. There had been digging in that well but somehow the team had not been able to find the remains… Kallis was also sure that the remains were there, but he could not convince the rest to continue the digging. He was telling us, “If necessary, I will dig myself and find them in this well” and I remember his Turkish Cypriot counterpart telling me that “Kallis is crazy, he thinks they are there! But they are not! He wants to dig the well himself!”
But in fact, sometime later, Xenis Challoumas would notice some of the remains in that already exhumed well and had notified Kallis and Georgiades who was the Greek Cypriot Member of CMP at that time… The excavation team of CMP would go back to the well we and Challoumas had shown and they would this time, find the remains of the Turkish Cypriot “missing” from Petrofani village…
Challoumas also showed me and Kallis and his TC counterparts another possible burial site in another area but some social housing had been built there and it would not be possible to dig under these houses…
Challoumas wouldn’t stop though, he would continue to help selflessly, with courage, with determination because he, above everyone else, knew what it meant to have a “missing person” from your family… He knew the pain, he knew the suffering, he knew the aguish, he knew what it meant to wait endlessly for any news about the fate of your missing… So he continued and found an old man who knew of a well in Troulli where some “missing” Turkish Cypriots from 1963-64 had been killed and buried. Challoumas found out the location of the well from this old man and showed it to the investigators of the CMP…
In fact, this had been the well that Kallis had told us about… Very often, he would say, “They need to dig that well in Troulli” and was enquiring from the exhumation coordinators of the CMP about when they would go there… Long before Challoumas discovered this well, Kallis had found it… He had been in communication with someone from abroad and when he came to Cyprus, he had shown the location of the well in Troulli to Kallis. Kallis had given the information to CMP…
The contract of Kallis had not been renewed by CMP and he was out – he was working for the Humanitarian Affairs Commissioner and had no way of deciding where to go to dig. But he was reminding the investigators and the coordinators of the Greek Cypriot Member’s Office of CMP to go to Troulli and dig that well…
Finally with the push of Challoumas, the well in Troulli would be dug… And the remains of four “missing” Turkish Cypriots from 1963-64 would be found…
Kidnapped and killed
Reshat Ahmet was a taxi driver from Kalavasos and he was staying in Engomi, Larnaca. While he was travelling in his taxi with two customers, Fuat Niyazi and Eshref Salih, he would be stopped in front of the Larnaca American Academy… Each time we passed from in front of the Academy, Kallis would tell us how the taxi was stopped there and they were kidnapped by some Greek Cypriots and killed and went “missing”.
The team who had kidnapped Reshat Ahmet, Fuat Niyazi and Eshref Salih was the team of “K…” from Larnaca. He was a well-known Greek Cypriot fascist who had a team who kidnapped and killed not only in 1963-64 but also in 1974. His team also kidnapped another Turkish Cypriot in December 1963, a driver who was carrying petrol with a tanker, Mustafa Mulla Hüseyin who was from Episkopi… Apparently they had buried him first in the well in Troulli and months later, in May 1964, they would kill and bury Reshat Ahmet, Eshref Salih and Fuat Niyazi whom they had kidnapped with the taxi in the same well… Therefore, when the CMP would dig this well in 2022, they would find the remains of four “missing” Turkish Cypriots, buried on different dates in the same well…
The team of “K…” who had kidnapped these four Turkish Cypriots would also kidnap “Karga” (“The Crow”) whose name was Mehmet Hasan Choban, a 24 year old young Turkish Cypriot staying in Agios Sozomenos village in 1974 – they would shoot him in the leg on the 6th of August 1974 and then put him in a landrover and carry him to an unknown place. They stopped in a coffeeshop to buy cigarettes and everyone in the coffeeshop in Potamia recognized the wounded person in the landrover: It was “Karga” who is still missing now…
What family said
Before the funeral, I would speak with the relatives of Reshat Ahmet – he had been married but his wife passed away. They had adopted a child called Ilkay but she too passed away… His sisters passed away.. Some of his sisters’ children and their own children were at the funeral..
Sultan Ozchetin, who had been the daughter of Reshat’s sister Salime Bengihan said, “He was my uncle. During the DNA tests, the CMP opened the grave of my mother and took some remains for DNA sampling. After the remains of my uncle were found, I visited my mother’s grave and told her: ‘Mom, your brother has been found and identified. Your DNA went all the way to America for DNA testing.’ When my uncle went missing I was 18 years old. He was a very kind person, very docile, did not argue with anyone…”
The other daughter of Reshat’s sister Salime, that is Hayriye Kizilduman said: “He was my uncle too… We grew up in the same village. Last time I saw him was when he took me from Larnaca to Kalavasos in his taxi. Due to the 63 intercommunal conflict, we left Kalavasos and I never saw him again… We were very sad to hear when he went missing…”
And the son of Reshat’s sister Salime, Hasan Bengihan said:
“He was my uncle. I used to spend a lot of time with him. He was a very calm person. His family was rich and he was the only son so he was raised as a single son, you could see that. The last time I saw him was 4-5 months before he went missing…”
I thank Challoumas for his humanitarian act and may Kallis rest in peace who has done so much work for all missing persons, both Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots…
