https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...ow-football-corruption-in-cyprus-turned-nasty
t was the second of six bomb attacks and the one closest to home. The dynamite, packed into a pipe, exploded in the small hours just before dawn. There was no warning, no call. When the blast came it did what its perpetrators had intended it to do: it ripped off a large chunk of the back of the two–storey building that is the headquarters of the Association of Cyprus Referees.
Charalambos Skapoullis remembers the moment well. Avoiding the autumnal heat, he was already up and training on one of the Nicosia pitches when the call came through at 5.30am. “When I got here there were broken windows, shattered panes, smashed glass everywhere,” he recalls. “I looked around and thought: ‘This isn’t funny.’ It’s got to the point where this has to be the most dangerous place in the world to be a referee.”
Three months later another explosive device erupted outside a modest house in the seaside town of Limassol. The force of the blast was such that 60-year-old Maro Mousko was catapulted from her bed on the second floor. The bomb was not intended for her – it was meant for her absent son, Thomas, also a league referee. Within weeks, the car belonging to the wife of another referee was torched and days before that Leontios Trattos, Cyprus’ most high-profile referee, awoke to the news that his vehicle, parked in the basement of his apartment building in Nicosia, had also been destroyed in what would be the second such attack against him. Referees, fearing for their lives, decided to vote with their feet: for a week they boycotted domestic matches and football fields altogether.
No one has been arrested for planting these bombs. A group, calling itself “Armed Gate Niners Urban Guerillas” emerged to claim responsibility, declaring the attacks “the beginning of an armed fight against rotten, contemporary Cypriot football”.
Even now, 18 months later, Skapoullis, a stocky man with sinewy arms and a stern demeanour, winces when talk turns to the attacks. So, too, does Spyros Neofitides, the president of the Pancyprian Footballers Association, who has found himself dealing with death threats against foreign players and in recent weeks has exhorted the local police to clean up the game.
(Article is too long, so you can read the rest by clicking on the link)
t was the second of six bomb attacks and the one closest to home. The dynamite, packed into a pipe, exploded in the small hours just before dawn. There was no warning, no call. When the blast came it did what its perpetrators had intended it to do: it ripped off a large chunk of the back of the two–storey building that is the headquarters of the Association of Cyprus Referees.
Charalambos Skapoullis remembers the moment well. Avoiding the autumnal heat, he was already up and training on one of the Nicosia pitches when the call came through at 5.30am. “When I got here there were broken windows, shattered panes, smashed glass everywhere,” he recalls. “I looked around and thought: ‘This isn’t funny.’ It’s got to the point where this has to be the most dangerous place in the world to be a referee.”
Three months later another explosive device erupted outside a modest house in the seaside town of Limassol. The force of the blast was such that 60-year-old Maro Mousko was catapulted from her bed on the second floor. The bomb was not intended for her – it was meant for her absent son, Thomas, also a league referee. Within weeks, the car belonging to the wife of another referee was torched and days before that Leontios Trattos, Cyprus’ most high-profile referee, awoke to the news that his vehicle, parked in the basement of his apartment building in Nicosia, had also been destroyed in what would be the second such attack against him. Referees, fearing for their lives, decided to vote with their feet: for a week they boycotted domestic matches and football fields altogether.
No one has been arrested for planting these bombs. A group, calling itself “Armed Gate Niners Urban Guerillas” emerged to claim responsibility, declaring the attacks “the beginning of an armed fight against rotten, contemporary Cypriot football”.
Even now, 18 months later, Skapoullis, a stocky man with sinewy arms and a stern demeanour, winces when talk turns to the attacks. So, too, does Spyros Neofitides, the president of the Pancyprian Footballers Association, who has found himself dealing with death threats against foreign players and in recent weeks has exhorted the local police to clean up the game.
(Article is too long, so you can read the rest by clicking on the link)
