A Cypriot army officer suspected of being a serial killer is being investigated for a third killing of a woman, after confessing to strangling to death two young women from the Philippines, police said in a statement on Wednesday.

The statement said that the new case emerged after digital crime specialists analyzed the suspect's phone data.

It did not name the woman, but said that her name was on a list of about 32 women reported as missing over the past 30 years.

Police have retrieved the nude bodies of two women, whose hands and feet had been tied, wrapped in pieces of cloth.

One of the bodies was pushed to the top of a disused iron ore mine shaft after it was flooded by rainwater and was accidentally found 11 days ago by a German tourist on a photographic visit to the mine.

Police searching the shaft pulled out another body, which has not been identified yet.

The 35-year-old cavalry captain admitted to the police that he had killed two women during love making, starting in May, 2018.

Newspapers published grisly details of an alleged deposition of the suspect, saying that he enjoyed strangling the women as he made love to them.

He is also suspected of killing the 7-year-old daughter of one of the victims, but he denied this, saying simply that the girl had drowned.

Teams of policemen, helped by divers, are employing sophisticated equipment to search the flooded shaft, where visibility is close to zero, and also a mine bond some distance away in search for the girl and other bodies of victims of the killer.

In another development, the chief of the police appointed a three-member team to investigate allegations of omissions in investigating the cases of missing women.

There are several thousand foreign women working mostly as house assistants in Cyprus, the majority of them coming from Sri Lanka and the Philippines.

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