20 TSALIKIDIS AND OTHERS v. GREECE JUDGMENT B. Merits 1. The applicant’s submissions 66. The applicants complained that very few steps had been taken by the national authorities during the investigation conducted from 2012 to 2014, and argued that those steps had not been sufficient to clarify the circumstances surrounding Mr Tsalikidis’ death. In their opinion, it had not been proved that the deceased had committed suicide and the steps taken in the second investigation had not been sufficient to rectify the serious omissions identified during the initial investigation. 67. The applicants argued that during the supplementary investigation new evidence had emerged which had reinforced the scenario of homicide, whereas the scenario of suicide had become less probable. In this respect, they stressed the importance of the reports by the two new experts, namely S.K. and Th.V. – both of whom possessed excellent credentials – who had identified a number of disturbing features in the initial autopsy, such as the absence of typical signs of hanging, the divergences between coroners’ testimonies as to the position of the rope mark and the inconsistencies concerning the cause of death. The applicants had informed the authorities of the contradictions that cast a shadow to the conclusions of the initial investigation, as soon as they had been made aware of them, with the assistance of their technical advisors. They also referred to the psychiatric report prepared at their request, which stated that the deceased had not betrayed any of the personality characteristics associated with a suicide risk. 68. Most importantly, they relied on the evidence discovered following the exhumation of the body, namely the broken hyoid bone, a phenomenon consistent with strangulation. Even though the lapse of time and the absence of surrounding soft tissue had made it impossible to conclude whether the hyoid bone had been broken ante-mortem or post-mortem, the applicants argued that it would have been highly improbable for all the other bones to have remained intact and the only one to be broken after death to be the hyoid bone. For the applicants, this evidence had been sufficient to call into question the conclusions of the initial investigation and to suggest homicide rather than suicide. In this regard, they cited the reports drawn up by the three coroners following the exhumation. Whereas during the initial investigation the death had been considered a suicide – for which reason the case file had been archived – the findings of the histology report had caused two out of the three coroners, namely I.B. and N.K, to conclude that the cause of death remained unclarified, meaning that homicide had not been excluded. The third coroner, Ch.S. had prepared a similar report without any reference to the cause of death. 69. The applicants cited a number of investigative measures which should have been taken in order for the investigation to have been effective. The biological material extracted following the exhumation of