Police were searching on Sunday for bodies in a flooded old mine shaft after a man reportedly confessed to the killing of at least two Asian women and a 7-year old girl in Cyprus’s first serial killing case, a police spokesman said.

Up to now, the police have retrieved the bodies of two women and are still looking for the body of the girl, who was daughter of one of the women. The police fear that more bodies may be found.

The case surfaced accidentally, after a German tourist who went to take pictures last Sunday of the rusted structures of an old iron mine at Mitsero, 30 miles south of Nicosia, came upon the corpse of a tied up woman wrapped in a sheet.

The body was brought to the surface of the 150 meter shaft by water which flooded most of the mine after months of an unusually rainy winter.

It was soon established from an ear ring that the badly rotten body belonged to a 38-year-old woman from the Philippines, named as Mary Rose Tribucio.

Policemen dusting the files of about 32 women reported missing over the last 30 years literally froze when they came upon her case, as her 7-year-old daughter Siera Graze Seucalius was also reported missing along with her.

Suspicion initially fell on Mary Rose’s former companion, a 33-year-old Romanian with a history of drinking. He was arrested, but was soon released, after a friend of the woman told the police that she had told her just before she went missing in May, 2018, that she was going to meet a new boyfriend, “Orestis”, whom she came to know on Badoo, a dating-focused social network.

The clue led to a 35-year-old captain in the armored branch division of the Cypriot army.

Digital crime police soon discovered his messages to Mary Rose and his invitation to her to meet and bring along her daughter to meet his own two children.

Police said “Orestis” was a false name he used along with the photograph of an army colleague in his Badoo account.

Confronted with the evidence, the captain cracked and confessed to strangling the woman and her daughter and dumping their bodies, police said. The suspect pointed to another mine close by as the place where he dumped the body of the girl. However, the police did not find anything and on Saturday they returned to the mine shaft.

Searching with underwater cameras, the policemen came upon the body of a second tied up woman, also wrapped in the same way as Mary Rose.

Police said that during the questioning, the suspect confessed to killing another woman last October, whose body he dumped into the shaft.

The second woman he killed was identified as Arian Palanas Lozano, aged 28, also from the Philippines.

He said he invited her on Badoo to meet, and then strangled her to death while making love.

Police are not still sure whether the second body belongs to Arian, as a genetic examination is still pending.

A police investigator, testifying before a court which on Sunday issued a remand order against the suspect for the second murder case, said the woman died between July, 2018 and April 20 of this year.

Teams of police on Sunday searched points which the suspect has showed them, including the mine shaft.