Marios Panayiotou was fined €1,000 on Tuesday by the Paphos Criminal Court for not having a licence for his pet Rottweiler, after being cleared of manslaughter last week.

Panayiotou’s dogs were suspected of mauling Petrana Milchova Nikolova to death in 2018.

But on December 9 the Paphos criminal court acquitted Panayiotou of Nikolova’s manslaughter after ruling there was no satisfactory testimony that the Rottweilers belonging to him caused the woman’s death. or that he was aware his dogs were dangerous.

The 46-year-old woman was found heavily injured in a field in Paphos and was rushed to Paphos general hospital, where doctors pronounced her dead on arrival. She was found to have died of haemorrhagic shock resulting from multiple injuries. It was initially said she was injured by agricultural machinery but later determined she was mauled by dogs.

Attorney-general Costas Clerides on December 10 said he would examine the possibility of filing an appeal against the acquittal by the Paphos criminal court.

Panayiotou’s defence lawyer, Elias Stephanou, said during Tuesday’s hearing that it was unfair to create doubts that condemned his client. He added that the impression was being created that justice had not been served. He pointed out that the defendant had been held in custody for about four months while awaiting trial.

The manslaughter trial ruled that the victim’s injuries had been caused by a dog or dogs and that in the cage of one of the defendant’s dogs, Draco, blood was found that was identified to belong to the victim. But there was no way of establishing how that blood got there.

It also said that to prove the defendant’s guilt there should be sufficient and credible evidence that Draco and the 28-year-old’s other dog, Daisy, had left his property on February 22, 2018, the day Nikolova was found, and be identified as the ones that attacked the victim. That the blood found in Draco’s cage could not be deposited there in any other way than by the dog himself also needed to be proven, and that this happened right after the attack on the victim and not at another time, the court said.

The transfer of the victim’s blood to Draco’s cage could, according to the court ruling, have been transferred by the dog after direct contact with the victim on the day she was found injured but could also have been transferred in the ensuing days since the dog could have gone to the spot where the victim’s blood was and dug into it with his nails.

The court also ruled that the attempt to match the injuries to the victim’s body with Draco’s teeth was “unscientific and arbitrary”, so there was no evidence linking this with Draco.





