AFP - The body of ex-president Tassos Papadopoulos was found three months after a grave robbery, Cyprus police said on Tuesday, following a tip-off call in "broken Greek" amid reports of a ransom demand.

"DNA identification (overnight) confirmed that the body discovered does indeed belong to former Cyprus president Tassos Papadopoulos," police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos told state radio.

The body was found at a cemetery in a Nicosia suburb late on Monday following an anonymous tip-off from a telephone box, he said.

A family spokesman, Chrysis Pantelides, told reporters that the caller who "spoke in broken Greek" had first telephoned the family who had redirected him to the police.

President Demetris Christofias, the successor to Papadopoulos as Greek Cypriot leader, expressed "relief and satisfaction" over the discovery, in a mysterious case which shocked the island.

The former head-of-state's widow, Fotini, read out a statement to the media at her wealthy family estate on the outskirts of the capital, and thanked the police for their efforts.

"The finding of the body of our beloved Tassos has finally put an end to the ordeal which has overwhelmed us for the past three months and has restored calm to our family," she said.

"We hope that the police investigation will lead to the location of the culprits as soon as possible."

Pantelides said the body, after examination by police and at the state morgue, would be returned to the Papadopoulos family grave near their home for a small private reburial.

Investigators have sealed off the village phone booth south of Nicosia from which the tip-off originated to collect fingerprints.

Grave robbers stole Papadopoulos' body from inside his coffin on December 11 -- one day before a memorial service was due to be held to mark the first anniversary of the 74-year-old's death from lung cancer.

A member of Papadopoulos' personal guard found the open grave -- less than five kilometres (three miles) from the discovery site -- when he went to light a candle, as he does every morning at the cemetery where he was buried.

Greek Cypriot media were awash with reports that the crime may have been a ransom attempt by a foreign gang as Papadopoulos ran a successful law firm before becoming president and had married into the wealthy Leventis family.

But Papadopoulos family members said in January that no ransom demand had been received. "We are completely in the dark," the late president's son Nicholas, an MP since 2006, told AFP at the time.

Police have said the robbery was "deliberate and carefully planned," with the perpetrators taking precautions to cover their tracks, but that they knew of no motive for the macabre raid.

Cyprus sought the help of Interpol, the FBI, Scotland Yard, and police from Greece and Israel as it scoured surrounding area.

Hardliner Papadopoulos was president from 2003 to 2008 and made political enemies during his lifetime. In 2004, he led Greek Cypriots in rejecting a UN plan to reunify the island in a referendum.

Turkish Cypriots backed the plan in a simultaneous vote, but the plan failed and a still divided island joined the European Union on May 1, 2004.