TWO Blackburn couples were grilled by police and accused of spying after stopping to video a roadside church while on holiday in Cyprus.

Friends Frank and Ann Woof, of Tiverton Drive, and Roy and Brenda Marsden, of Heys Lane, were quizzed by police about video footage of their holiday in Ayia Napa in the south east of the island.

Officers threatened to confiscate their camera and video film and photocopied their passports.

Mr Woof, 51, a design engineer, said: "We had hired a jeep and were just driving through the country when we came to this village called Liopetri. Roy has a video camera and he decided to film a church.

"As he started to film we heard some shouts from behind us telling us to stop filming and we realised we were right in front of a Cypriot army base. We just waved and said OK and carried on our journey. That night we had just finished dinner when the head waiter came and said there was someone to see us."

Waiting for them were two Cypriot police officers. Frank said: "They said that we had been taking photographs. I could see they were deadly serious. They wanted to confiscate our film and search our rooms. They took our passports and photocopied them." Anxious that they would lose all the photographs they had taken of their trip, Frank suggested that instead the officers watched the video Roy had taken.

The army camp they had stumbled across was just four miles from the sensitive border area where the Southern Republic of Cyprus meets the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

And when they got home, Frank and Ann had another surprise.

Their daughter, Lisa, 27, had plastered the house with posters welcoming "James Bond and Miss Moneypenny" home!

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