Litterbugs beware…

LITTERBUGS beware. Big Brother is watching you, with anybody caught littering the streets liable to a £20 fine.

And it doesn’t even have to be the police who catch you in the act, but can be any member of the public who can report you.

Nineteen-year-old student Aristodelous Antoniou suffered just that fate last week when he received a phone call from the police, completely out of the blue.

“I was at home when I received a call on my mobile from Lycavitos police station,” he told the Mail. “An officer said that a woman had made a complaint against me for allegedly throwing empty cigarette packets out of my car window and I had to report to the station to pay a fine. I denied the accusation, but was told to visit the station anyway.”

Antoniou claims a friend of his, who was a passenger in the car at the time, was responsible for the offence, but he decided to pay the fine as he was told the case could end up in court.

“This incident has raised some disturbing questions,” he said. “What’s to stop me making a call to the police and reporting somebody I don’t like? I could easily give their vehicle registration number and make up a story that I saw them littering in order to get them into trouble.”

When asked how a case could be proved if it’s simply a matter of ‘your word against mine’, police spokeswoman Chrystalla Demetriou explained that, “it would greatly benefit the accuser if he or she can provide a witness to back up the allegation. If there is no witness and the alleged perpetrator does not admit to an offence, it does become difficult to prove.”

She said each case is dealt with individually with few actually ending up in court, where the maximum sentence is a £500 fine.

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.