Funeral held for Arian

Friends and relatives of Arian attended her funeral on Thursday, five months after the body of the young Filipina was discovered in an abandoned mine shaft outside Nicosia.

Arian Palanas Lozano, a 28-year-old woman from the Philippines, was the second slain victim that was discovered in a serial killer case that shocked Cyprus and the world earlier this year.

The funeral was held at the Church of the Holy Cross in downtown Nicosia on Thursday afternoon around 4pm. Reports said the burial will take place in her native country per the family’s wishes.

Arian had come to Cyprus in 2017 where she worked at the home of a former police deputy in Aglandjia, Nicosia. After her employers went to the mountains for vacation, Arian reportedly “didn’t want to sit around doing nothing” according to sources and she was said to have been looking for part time work opportunities. She was last seen on 21 July 2018.

Police were criticized for not taking seriously a number of missing reports of foreign females, seven of whom ended up being murdered by Nikos Metaxas, a Greek Cypriot army captain also known as Orestis. He was convicted and sentenced to seven life sentences for raping and killing seven women including two children.

The 35-year-old confessed-killer preyed on Arian through the social networking platform Badoo. Orestis admitted he met Arian online and they arranged to meet. After taking her to his house, he had sexual intercourse with her when he strangled her to death and then tossed the lifeless body into the mine shaft in rural Nicosia.

The body was discovered on April 18 a few days after a group of bikers discovered by chance another body that belonged to 38-year-old Marry Rose Tiburcio. Marry Rose and her young daughter went missing in early May 2018, two months before Arian went to meet Orestis, who confessed that the Filipina mother and daughter were among his victims.

The case initially had come to be known as the Filipina murders, as more women from the Philippines were missing and it was reported that Orestis admitted to police he “had a thing” for Filipino women. Adult females came forward after his arrest saying they were approached by a persistent Orestis, including a young Filipina model who said he raped her in his car while she knew only his real name as a professional photographer but had no idea of the Orestis online handle.

The Cypriot government has apologized to the families of the victims, pledging assistance and vowing to get to the bottom of what actually happened that led to missing complaints being mishandled by police.