How a fig tree helped to identify a slain Turkish Cypriot:
This is the story of a slain Turkish Cypriot man who helped his family find his body with a fig seed in his stomach that grew into a tree.
The Committee on Missing Persons in Cypus (CMP) has been searching for 2,002 people who disappeared on the divided Mediterranean island between 1963 and 1974.
The CMP has identified and returned the remains of 890 people to date.
The CMP was launched in 1981 by an agreement between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities under the auspices of the United Nations. The committee was tasked with the mission of preparing a list of missing persons and learning the fate of those people.
One of those missing persons was a United States citizen. Since the U.S. government wanted to know the fate of the U.S. citizen, the committee shifted its focus to identifying and returning the remains of the missing people to their families.
Blood samples were collected from relatives who also gave information regarding the clothing they were wearing at the time of their disappearance.
Bodies of 890 missing persons have been found and returned to their families over the past 12 years.
Zeynep Bilgehan
