CYPRUS JUNTA’S PRESIDENT Leading member of Eoka named

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33588, 17 July 1974, Page 13

CYPRUS JUNTA’S PRESIDENT Leading member of Eoka named

(By DAVID BARBER, an N.Z.P.A. staff correspondent, who was in Cyprus during the emergency of the 19505, as a British national serviceman and a reporter for the "Times of Cyprus," a daily newspaper)

LONDON, July 16.

Nicholas Sampson, named in a radio report today as the new President of Cyprus, was the young journalist who was always first with the news of the latest killings during the emergency of the 19505.

It was later learned why. He was a leading member of Eoka, the underground terrorist organisation led by the elusive General George Grivas, dedicated to freeing Cyprus from British rule and obtaining union with Greece.

Born Nicos Georghiades (a very common Cyprus name) he adopted his father’s baptismal name of Sampson when, soon after leaving school, he set out to make his journalistic mark as the “Times of Cyprus” correspondent in his home town of Famagusta.

He peppered the newspaper’s office — then situated next to Archbishop Makarios’s palace in Nicosia — with a constant stream of telephoned reports about murders, bombing and other Eoka action in the ancient coastal town.

Sampson later moved to Nicosia where he joined a Greek language paper and built up a reputation for scoops — he was always first with the story and his paper always had the first pictures of the latest bloody event in the capital.

Then, during one of the island’s most violent periods in the last half of 1956, Sampson disappeared. It was at this time that Ledra Street, Nicosia’s main thoroughfare, became known as “murder mile” for the number of English troops and policemen who were gunned down along its shop-lined length. Soon, someone had put two and two together and a new “wanted” poster went up in the island’s police stations. It was headed: “Special notice to all security forces” and under a photograph of Sampson it read: “This is the man believed to be responsible for shooting your comrades. Look for him everywhere.”

Sampson was eventually arrested in 1957, after an informer had led police to the village house where he was sleeping. The future President of Cyprus appeard in court with his legs shackled by a chain, and an arm in a sling. Police said he had fought furiously with his captors.

Subsequently sentenced to death, he was later reprieved and flown to Britain to serve a life sentence.

Sent to Greece, under an amnesty in 1959, he returned to Cyprus at the end of the emergency and launched a daily newspaper called “Battle,” and a weekly entitled “Struggle.” He wrote a serialised account of the shootings he and his Eoka execution squad carried out. He claimed that the team he led was responsible for more than 20 killings in Nicosia between August, 1956, and his arrest the following January. Among them was a broad daylight gun battle with three British police sergeants on “murder mile.” in which two of the policemen died and the third was seriously wounded.