Two adults have been arrested by police after separate serious traffic accidents in Larnaca this past weekend. Both crashes involved young teenagers driving cars, who were badly hurt. The incidents happened at a similar time on Sunday morning and have started a major discussion about parental responsibility and how minors can get access to vehicles. A fourteen-year-old and a thirteen-year-old boy are now in hospital in Nicosia with serious injuries. Each boy lost control of the car they were driving on rural dirt roads.
The first accident was reported just after 10:30 a.m. near Athienou. Early information from police suggests a car, driven by a fourteen-year-old boy, was moving at high speed on an unpaved road when the driver lost control. The vehicle then overturned. Even though he was wearing a seatbelt, the teenager suffered a serious head injury. He was taken first to Larnaca General Hospital and then transferred to a specialist brain injury unit in Nicosia.
In a very similar event, a second crash was reported at around the same time in another rural part of Larnaca. There, a thirteen-year-old boy was driving a car that left the road, hit several trees, and rolled over. He was also taken quickly to Larnaca General Hospital with serious injuries before being moved to a main hospital in Nicosia. Doctors say his condition was critical but is now stable and he is not in immediate danger.
After the crashes, police attention turned to the adults responsible for the cars. Officers arrested a relative of the fourteen-year-old, who is the registered owner of that car. In the second case, police detained the forty-year-old father of the thirteen-year-old boy, who owns the vehicle. Both adults are now being questioned about how the underage boys were able to drive. The legal consequences for allowing an unlicensed child to drive a car are very serious and can include charges of criminal negligence.
These two tragedies have highlighted an ongoing problem in some rural areas: the practice of allowing underage driving on quiet roads. Safety experts strongly criticize this, stating that a lack of training and young, impulsive judgment is a deadly mix. Police investigations are continuing to determine the exact causes and who is responsible. These events are a sad reminder that adults have the clear duty to prevent such predictable accidents.