On 7 June 1958, a bomb exploded at the entrance of the Turkish Press Office in Nicosia. The bombing was immediately blamed on Greek Cypriots. Turkish Cypriot mobs responded by looting and burning Greek Cypriot shops and homes across the capital, marking a turning point in the ethno-sectarian violence that would scar the island for the next two decades.

Twenty-six years later, in a 1984 interview for the British ITV documentary End of Empire: Cyprus, Britain’s Grim Legacy (produced by Granada TV), Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktaş admitted that the bomb had been placed by Turkish extremists.

His direct quote from the documentary:

“There was an explosion at the information bureau to the Turkish consulate. A crowd had already gathered there, a crowd of the Turkish Cypriot community. And they almost immediately decided that Greeks had done it and they were swearing vengeance against the Greeks and so on.”

And, on the same program, former Turkish diplomat Emin Dirvana confirmed what had really happened:

“A friend of mine, whose name must still be kept secret, was to confess to me that he had put this little bomb in the doorway in order to create an atmosphere of tension so that people would know that the Turkish Cypriots mattered.”

Denktaş had actually admitted the same thing earlier, in 1964, to the Turkish newspaper Milliyet. The Turkish Cypriot ambassador to Nicosia at the time, Emin Dirvana, also wrote in Milliyet on 15 June 1964:

“I was informed that on 7 June 1958 a bomb had been planted in the Turkish press office in Nicosia by persons who, as was later established, had nothing to do with the Greek Cypriots. The Turks of Nicosia were then incited to be overwhelmed by holy indignation and perpetrated acts similar to those committed on 6 and 7 September 1955 in Istanbul.”

According to a later Special Branch report of the colonial police, the bomb “was planted by the Turks as a pretext for the arson and looting” that followed.

This is widely regarded as a key piece of evidence on how the intercommunal violence that culminated in the 1974 division was deliberately inflamed from within the Turkish Cypriot side.