Word: kyprianou
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...rage. At the military funeral for the slain 15, he lashed away furiously at both the Palestinian liberation movement and Cyprus. Yasser Arafat's followers, he said, were "little people and idiots." Sadat announced a break in diplomatic relations with Cyprus' Greek government and dismissed President Spyros Kyprianou as "a dwarf (the Egyptian is 5 ft. 9 in., while the Cypriot is 5 ft. 4 in.). "Cyprus should explain to me," said a Sadat close to tears, "the treachery that was committed against my sons...
...this point President Kyprianou promised them Cypriot passports and safe conduct to Athens in exchange for the hostages. In the course of negotiations, Kyprianou received two fateful overseas telephone calls. The first was from Arafat in Beirut. The P.L.O. leader was furious because a close aide was among the hostages. Arafat offered the services of a twelve-man squad of experienced gunmen. Kyprianou accepted and dispatched an airliner to Beirut to pick them up. The squad, armed with Soviet AK-47 submachine guns, was kept out of sight inside the terminal, waiting for a crack at the hijackers. Later, there...
More puzzling was the role of the Egyptian commandos. The second telephone call had come from Sadat. In anguish over the assassination of his friend, he begged President Kyprianou to rescue the hostages, one of whom was Egyptian, and to send the Palestinian killers to Cairo for trial. Kyprianou told him, "I personally will handle the matter...
Constitutionally the job fell for the moment to Spyros Kyprianou, 46, president of the house of representatives. But Kyprianou has heart problems himself. At least two other candidates also want the job, and the Greek vote is split among half a dozen factions. The four major political parties proposed that the solution might be to let Kyprianou hold the post until February, when an election would have been held in any case...
According to Kyprianou, Russia would soon be supplying not only mon ey, but arms as well in the struggle to outmaneuver the Turkish minority on the island. Since the Greek Cypriots were already adequately stocked with enough firepower to destroy the Turkish Cypriots, some experts assumed that the deal might involve radar equipment and antiaircraft weapons sophisticated enough to prevent Turkish planes from resuming their forays from the mainland 40 miles away. Such equipment would surely require the services of expert Russian personnel-giving Moscow its first real foothold in the Mediterranean...