Katia Christodoulou/European Pressphoto Agency

Updated | 1:12 p.m. One day before the anniversary of his death, the remains of the late president of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, were stolen from a graveyard outside Nicosia, the nation’s capital.

According to the Cypriot police, the theft was discovered on Friday morning by a former bodyguard who visited the tomb where Mr. Papadopoulos was buried last year after he died of lung cancer at the age of 74. Reuters reported that the visitor “found piles of earth by the graveside and an empty casket within.”

A local news source, The Famagusta Gazette reported that police in the capital city of Nicosia are “questioning three men” in connection with their investigation. The Gazette also cited “unconfirmed reports” suggesting that the three men may be “officers from Greece serving with the Cyprus National Guard.”

The Web site Cyprus Mail noted: “The news sent shock waves across Cyprus with several politicians condemning the act. Police have cordoned off the grave and are scouring the rain-soaked area for clues.”

Tensions between local Greek and Turkish communities erupted on Cyprus soon after it achieved independence from Britain in 1960, and the island remains physically divided, with a no man’s land that also splits the capital in two.

A political leader from the Turkish community on Cyprus said the act may have been a provocation intended to disrupt current peace talks aimed at reunification. According to an earlier report from The Famagusta Gazette, Rauf Denktash, the former leader of the Turkish Cypriots, said:

We are shocked, not only surprised, whoever has done it, I think has done it for a purpose and that purpose cannot be a good one. […] I understand that it is being circulated amongst the Greek Cypriots that Turks have done it, if this is true then it means it has been done by provocateurs who do not want a settlement but want the two side to be more apart than they are today.

As Voice of America explained on Thursday, there has been some recent momentum in the direction of a settlement that would reunify the Turkish and Greek parts of the island. This week a group of international statesmen known as “The Elders,” which includes former President Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu, visited Nicosia for the third time to encourage the talks. VOA noted “Their return this week comes as the Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat and his Greek Cypriot counterpart Dimitris Christofias held their 57th meeting in the buffer zone which divides this island.”

VOA’s report, filed before the grave-robbing incident, also includes a possible clue as to what people opposed to the reconciliation might hope to achieve by stalling the talks, if indeed that was the reason for the operation: “There is now an element of urgency to these talks as Mehmet Ali Talat, who favors reunification and membership of the EU for all Cyprus will be facing an election in April 2010. A candidate from the opposition National Unity Party, which favors unification with Turkey, is leading in the opinion polls and a win for them could destroy the talks.”

Cyprus Mail quoted state radio reporting that although the grave had been covered by a heavy granite slab, “It did not appear that any machinery had been used in the process.” The Web site also reported that Mr. Papadopoulos’s family said a memorial service scheduled for Saturday would go ahead as planned.

As The Associated Press explained, from 2003 until 2008 Mr. Papadopoulos was “a hard-line president who ushered the ethnically divided island into the European Union after rallying Greek Cypriots to reject a United Nations-brokered peace deal” in 2004.

The A.P. added that Mr. Papadopoulos “was a veteran of Cyprus politics whose career spanned most of the island’s turbulent history since gaining independence from British colonial rule in 1960. He was a leader of the Greek Cypriot guerrilla group EOKA, which waged an anticolonial campaign, and served as the youngest cabinet minister in the island’s first post-independence government, at the age of 26.” Years later, The A.P. noted he was “the chief Greek Cypriot negotiator in settlement talks with the breakaway Turkish Cypriots after 1974, when Turkey invaded the island in response to a coup by supporters of uniting the island with Greece.”

Mr. Papadopoulos’s family issued a statement on Friday that said: