Groom saves drowning girl on his wedding day

A 40-YEAR-OLD Briton saved a disabled teenager from drowning when he leapt to her rescue from his ground-floor Ayia Napa hotel apartment, hours before he was due to get married, reports said yesterday.

Former Navy diver Todd Sweeney, from Plymouth, was in Cyprus with fiancée Hazel Bowden and their one-year-old daughter when the incident occurred, reported The Herald, a Plymouth-based newspaper.

The paper said Sweeney, who was due to marry Bowden at Ayia Napa town hall at 2pm on May 15, was lounging on their apartment balcony when he noticed a body on the bottom of the swimming pool.

Apparently the teenager, who was holidaying in Cyprus with a group from London, had suffered a seizure and sank underwater unnoticed.

“I’m just glad I was there,” Sweeney told The Herald. “The three of us were relaxing and getting ready for the wedding and I had my feet up on the balcony when I suddenly noticed a body at the bottom of the pool. I think my training just kicked in automatically. I leapt off the balcony – we were on the ground floor opposite the pool – on to the deck and then was straight in the pool 15 yards away. I got her out and did CPR. She’d turned blue and I had to get her breathing.”

The incident occurred at around 11am. By the time the ambulance arrived to transport the teen to hospital, Sweeney had resuscitated her and put her in the recovery position, the paper said. The couple learned she had made a full recovery and saw her back in the pool before they returned home two days later.

“I dried off, had a brief sit- down and then went. It was still a lovely wedding, with Neala as a flower girl and photos taken afterwards at a monastery. I was a bit jumpy and shocked about what had happened, but nothing a cold beer didn’t sort out afterwards. It was an eventful day,” he said.

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.