Former Cypriot president Demetris Christofias, the island’s first Communist head of state, died on Friday, authorities said. Christofias was president of Cyprus from 2008 to 2013, and prior to that headed AKEL, the moderate Communist party which is one of Cyprus’s largest. It was on Christofias’s watch that munitions confiscated from an Iranian tanker destined for Syria exploded while being stored on Cyprus, triggering the island’s worst peacetime disaster and killing 13 people. Also during his presidency, Cyprus began prospecting for hydrocarbon reserves off its coast, making its first natural gas discovery in 2011. Christofias was a strong supporter of efforts to reunite the ethnically partitioned island, split in a Turkish invasion in 1974 after a brief Greek-inspired coup.

Source: Nigerian Tribune June 21, 2019 16:07 UTC