The Turkish gunman who was arrested by the Republic of Cyprus’ police and handed over to the United Nations and then the Turkish Cypriot authorities at the Ledra Palace crossing point had been paid 600,000TL (€13,497) to fire shots at a house, he said in court on Friday.

He told a court in Kyrenia that he had been paid the money by “two people whose surnames I did not know” to shoot at a house in the Kyrenia district village of Karavas.

During the same hearing, a representative of the Turkish Cypriot police told the court that the man, who is 20 years old, fired three shots at the house with a nine-millimetre pistol on the morning of May 23, and that he had come into possession of the gun illegally.

The Turkish Cypriot police had said earlier that while the walls of the house were damaged, no injuries or loss of life were recorded.

The representative added on Friday that the man had then left the gun and five bullets by the side of the road, before getting into a taxi which took him to Nicosia.

There, the representative said, the man entered the Yigitler Burcu park atop Nicosia’s Roccas bastion. There, Nicosia’s city wall forms the buffer zone between Cyprus’ two sides, with the top of the wall being in the north.

The representative told the court that the man crossed into the Republic from the park, before later being arrested by the Republic of Cyprus’ police and then handed over to the UN at the Ledra Palace crossing point on Wednesday.

The man was remanded in custody for five days.

Meanwhile, the taxi driver who took the man to Nicosia has also been arrested, with the police alleging that he knew of the plan and that he “ensured that [the gunman] crossed into the south of Cyprus illegally”.

The taxi driver appeared in a military court in northern Nicosia and was released on bail.

The man’s arrest comes amid a growing number of similar incidents in the north, with four contracted hitmen having been arrested in the north in the space of the last nine months.

In response to the wave of such incidents, Turkish Cypriot opposition political party CTP ‘MP’ Sami Ozuslu had suggested that the north be renamed as the “hitman’s paradise of northern Cyprus”.

“If you have the authority, I would like to request that we change the name of the TRNC to the ‘hitman’s paradise of northern Cyprus’, let it be on the records,” he told the north’s ‘parliament’.

“This is the situation we are currently experiencing.”

In Turkish, the acronym “KKTC”, for “TRNC”, is unchanged if “Turkish republic” is exchanged for “hitman’s paradise”.

Ozuslu went on to argue that there is “no security of life or property in the country”, given the relative frequency of hitmen being arrested, with his statements drawing the ire of ‘health minister’ Hakan Dincyurek.

Dincyurek accused him of “insulting this country’s name, this state’s name”.

“You are in this country’s republican assembly, you. The office you represent is that of a member of parliament of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. You come here and discredit an institution which you do not respect and in which you do not believe. No one accepts this; I also do not accept this. I condemn you with all my heart. Come and apologise,” he said.