THE GOVERNMENT yesterday made a stark appeal to motorists to respect traffic laws or see more young lives wasted on the roads, after two teenagers were killed on Sunday, bringing the death toll on the roads so far this year to 105 – 20 more than for the same time last year.
Police yesterday blamed reckless speeding for the crash.
Justice Minister Doros Theodorou said the latest deaths should be a signal to society that all citizens must recognise the importance of sticking to traffic laws, otherwise “the grim reaper of the tarmac will continue to take the lives of children, adults and the elderly.”
The two victims, 16-year-old Chrysostomi Hindikou from Ayia Trimithia and 17-year-old Charalambos Zintilis from Paliometocho were both passengers in a car driven by an 18-year-old man from Nicosia, when the vehicle went off the road at around 4am on Sunday on Archbishop Makarios Avenue in Lakatamia. The teenagers died instantly.
The driver and two other passengers were seriously injured, one of them critically, and are being kept under observation at Nicosia General Hospital.
Police spokesman Demetris Demetriou said yesterday that drivers were “still undisciplined and reckless,” as this year’s road death toll exceeded last year’s by 20.
“We had 85 dead by this time last year,” he said. “Our investigations are still ongoing but it looks as though inexperience and excessive speed were behind this accident.”
In Sunday’s accident, the vehicle spun off the road, ploughed up a pavement, rammed into a billboard in a parking lot and proceeded to hit a concrete wall and a road sign before coming to a stop against a steel postbox.
Demetriou could not confirm reports that the car driven by the 18-year-old was “souped up”.
But Theodorou said there were a worrying number of accidents among drivers who had their car engines modified so they could reach higher speeds, without having their breaks and clutch adjusted accordingly.
“I have already contacted the Communications Ministry and asked that the existing law be amended to criminalise the illegal modification of horsepower. This way any mechanic doing such work will know that they will be breaking the law and will go to jail.”
Experts at a police road safety conference earlier this year warned that 18-year-olds in Cyprus were three times as likely to be involved in road accidents as 40-year-olds.
Andreas Papas, former director of Traffic Police, told the conference that four out of 10 drivers who died in road accidents were aged between 18 and 24, while one in five accidents involved people who had been driving for under one year.
