WHEN POLICE found Andis Hadjicostis, he lay lifeless, with his shirt soaked in blood, his eyes wide open and legs splayed, beneath the open door of the car parked outside his home.
Minutes earlier the Greek Cypriot media mogul had been shot at point blank range by two men on a motorbike.
Before neighbours could rush to his aid, the assailants had fled the scene, a leafy side street in the heart of Nicosia.
Today, nearly 10 months after the murder, Elena Skordelli, the presenter who hosted the primetime news on Sigma, the channel owned by Mr Hadjicostis (43) will appear before Cyprus’s criminal court accused of ordering the killing.
The 41-year-old TV star will be joined by three other defendants including Anastasios Krasopoulis, her 37-year-old brother.
The prosecution contends that the siblings masterminded the murder after Ms Skordelli was sacked by Mr Hadjicostis, her boss.
But it wasn’t just a simple case of revenge for having her career brought to an end.
Compelling commercial motives also played a role, according to court documents.
As the owners of 20 per cent of the shares of Sigma’s parent company, Dias, Ms Skordelli and her brother were determined to buy a majority stake in the group.
On an island more used to the sleepy rhythms of the Levant, the case has become a cause célèbre. Life imprisonment is in store for Ms Skordelli if she is found guilty.
As the plot has thickened, Cypriots on both sides of the ethnic divide are asking “did she or didn’t she do it? “These are like scenes from an ancient tragedy,” said President Demetris Christofias, the Greek-Cypriot leader in one of many examples of the high-level interest aroused by the affair.
It will not be the first time that the immaculately manicured, Burberry-wearing Ms Skordelli enters the dock.
The trial opened in Nicosia’s colonial-era court house earlier in the year but was postponed when authorities in Moldova arrested Gregoris Xenofontos, the man who is alleged to have pulled the trigger.
Following his extradition to the island, a re-run of the hearing was announced, with the judge declaring that proceedings would resume “from the beginning”.
This has meant that Ms Skordelli, one of the Greek Cypriot elite used to a life of conspicuous consumption, has spent almost a year locked up in the womens’ wing of Nicosia’s prison.
A bail plea, following Mr Xenofontos’s seizure, was rejected on the grounds that the defendants might try to escape or tamper with evidence.
“She spends most of her time painting, knitting, embroidering and ironing clothes,” said her husband Andreas.
“She wants to go home.”
To date, the prosecution has rested it case on the testimony of one witness: Theophanis Hadjigeorgiou (30), one of the two motorcyclists spotted in TV footage fleeing the scene of the crime.
After his own arrest, and in return for immunity from prosecution, Mr Hadjigeorgiou claimed he was hired by the siblings to kill Mr Hadjicostis in exchange for €48,000 and the promise of a job for life at Sigma.
Appointing the hit men, Ms Skordelli allegedly declared: “I want this man dead.” – (Guardian service)