The five people – four women and one man – who were arrested last week over the finding of classified documents in the home of a prison warden, were released on Friday.

The suspects – four prison wardens and a police cadet – were being investigated for conspiracy to commit a felony, misuse of power and violation of service confidentiality inter alia.

The Nicosia district court had issued seven-day remand orders against them last Friday.

The Cyprus News Agency reported earlier that the suspects were to be released after “no data emerged which would justify their further detention”.

However, the reports said, the five will remain on leave “due to their arrest and suspicions which have arisen regarding their alleged involvement in the case”.

The police are said to be “intensively continuing” their investigation into the matter, with it expected that more people will be summoned to testify over the case in the coming days.

In total, more than 110 depositions have been taken, while more than 60 people have been interviewed at police stations over the matter.

At the same time, the police are continuing to evaluate and analyse the documents which were found, with there said to be more than 300,000 pages worth of material.

The reports also said that 42 hard drives containing CCTV footage from the central prison were found as part of the police’s investigation into the case, with 478 other items, including digital disks and “electronic data storage units” – such as floppy disks, memory cards, or memory sticks – being examined by investigators.

The police are said to believe that the bulk of the material was taken out of the central prison between November and December 2022.

The documents were found during the search of the home of another prison warden on April 10, with his home having been searched as part of an investigation into an alleged scam involving a convict buying items from the prison canteen and selling them to other inmates at an inflated price.

The inmate had allegedly taken a cut of the profit to look the other way.

Earlier this week, newspaper Politis had said the documents had been taken out of the prison via a staircase near the prison’s administrative offices, and that they had been hidden in cloth bags. On some occasions, it was reported that prisons department vehicles were used to transport the documents out of the prison.