‘Police went on a wild goose chase’

WHAT BEGAN as a report into teenage delinquency rapidly turned into a child prostitution investigation as police yesterday misread a story that appeared in the Cyprus Mail.

In a scathing press release yesterday, the police attacked this newspaper, describing a story on underage drinking in the Limassol area as “completely unsubstantiated and not reflective of reality”.

The statement added that the Criminal Investigation Division had interviewed all of those involved and not found any reports substantiating allegations of child prostitution.

“It’s an embarrassing case of crossed wires,” said assistant editor Katherine Toumbourou yesterday. “Where we quoted a counsellor as saying teens would turn to prostitution, the police took the warning as a given and went on a tangent.”
Yesterday morning, the CID came into the Nicosia offices of the Cyprus Mail looking for the reporter responsible for Wednesday’s story that quoted a student counsellor as saying: “It’s out of control. When parents stop giving their kids money they’ll end up exploiting themselves to get their [drug] dosage”.

After consulting her sources, the journalist gave the police the names of the concerned parents and relatives who called the newspaper with reports of children as young as 11 visiting bars in the Yermasogeia district.
“But instead of investigating the reports of underage drinking in Limassol, the police went looking for child prostitutes that we never mentioned,” said Toumbourou.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.