Hands up anyone who thinks there will be full accountability for the Takata airbags scandal that has resulted in the deaths of two young people that we know of and only because their parents raised the alarm?

How could Takata airbag recalls in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US spanning more than a decade with 100 million vehicles recalled by 20 car importers go unnoticed in Cyprus either by successive governments, bureaucrats, MPs, importers and dealers?

The odds that no one knew anything about this are literally zero.

As far back as 2016, Toyota Cyprus said it was recalling 80 cars for checks after it was established that 1.43 million cars worldwide needed repairs involving airbags. This was published in the local media.

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So, the question is not: “How could they not have known in Cyprus?” but “who knew what and when did they know it?”

Right now, we’re drowning in a tsunami of information related to both how to solve the problem going forward with tens of thousands of ticking time-bombs still on the island’s roads and on how this massive scandal came about.

Everybody involved may plead ignorance, cite mistakes and express regret when the dust settles but where will the responsibility ultimately lie and will the investigations themselves be another case of “pass the buck”?

This isn’t a disciplinary offence. It’s criminal. How many more road fatalities were caused by faulty airbags that went unnoticed during crash investigations by police?

It was reported that the parents of 24-year-old Kyriakos Oxinos who died in 2023 were never informed of a recall for their son’s car despite it having been flagged by the manufacturer in 2020. The same pattern appears to have played a role in the more recent death of 19-year-old Styliani Giorgalli in October 2024.

Both of these tragedies were avoidable had action been taken sooner. It is clear that authorities and car importers did not act with any urgency whether due to bureaucratic inefficiency, lack of awareness, or outright indifference. 

To add insult to injury, earlier this week, the families of the two young people who died were mistakenly sent recall notices for their children’s cars by the road transport department which later had to issue an apology.

It was Kyriakos’ father Yiannos who first pressed Transport Minister Alexis Vafeades into action, presenting evidence in April 2023, two months after the accident of the dangers posed by the airbags.

This should have been enough to act. Vafeades insists his ministry acted swiftly citing meetings, correspondence and public awareness campaigns.

Perhaps so, but it was clearly not fast or decisive enough as a 19-year-old woman appears to have died for the same reason 18 long months later. Yiannos said it was only properly looked at when the House started to pile on the pressure.

Whatever the outcome of the various investigations, the lesson should be to take notice of the red flags, not wait until people are dead. The first recorded injury from an airbag in Cyprus was in 2018. Takata was a global scandal for at least a decade. That absolutely no one in Cyprus knew this can only be a lie.