Investigation launched into bus driver who threw dumped rowdy kids

THE CYPRUS Sports Federation (KOA) yesterday confirmed that a minder responsible for ditching a five young children returning from swimming lessons and forcing them to walk five kilometres to their home had left the organisation.

The children, aged between nine and 11, were attending KOA’s Sports For All programme, aimed at getting schoolchildren to practice more sports, under permission from the Ministry of Education.

The KOA bus driver and the minder had collected the children from the Apostolos Varnavas primary school in Acropolis and taken them to the Municipal swimming pool for lessons. But on the way back at around 4.30pm on Tuesday, the bus driver and the minder decided to throw the children off the bus at the Nicosia General hospital because they were misbehaving.

According to one furious parent, the children waited for around 20 minutes for the bus to come back, thinking the two adults were just trying to scare them, but soon realised they had no choice but to walk all the way to Acropolis.

But speaking to the Cyprus Mail yesterday, KOA chairman Costas Papacostas said the bus driver had not been fired and that an investigation was under way in order to allocate the blame where it is due.

“We are getting into an in-depth investigation and things are expected to be made clear soon,” he said.

“We have also reported the incident to the police and they have launched their own investigation into reports that one of the children was scratched by the minder as she got him off the bus,” he added.

Papacostas said the incident was the first in 14 years of the programme.

“It was an unfortunate incident,” he said.

“We have been running this programme for 14 years with 15,000 children and we’ve never had any problems.”