A faulty airbag manufactured by Japanese company Takata was the cause of the death of 26-year-old Turkish national Ali Osman Bayram, who died in a car crash in the north, the Turkish Cypriot police confirmed on Friday.

The police said that an autopsy on Bayram’s body had found that the airbag inside the steering wheel had exploded, causing a piece of iron to lodge in his skull, killing him.

Earlier in the day, Cyprus Turkish chamber of mechanical engineers chairman Ayer Yarkiner had said his chamber had also found that Bayram’s death had been caused by the airbag, and lamented a lack of action over the matter on the part of the Turkish Cypriot authorities.

“Vehicles with risky airbags affected by the Takata crisis are being allowed to be imported without inspection,” he said, adding that “despite years of warnings, the necessary precautions have not been taken”.

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“The government is indifferent, the prime minister is not taking responsibility, and the transport ministry is passive,” he said.

Vehicles fitted with potentially lethal Takata airbags have been subject to a mass recall in the Republic this year, with Transport Minister Alexis Vafeades having decreed the recall of over 80,000 cars in February.

This week, the eight-month grace period on those recalls, allocated to allow motorists to have their airbags replaced, began to expire, with vehicles having their road tax and MOT certificates rescinded on various dates between Friday and October 30.

The issue of airbag safety stems from the production of faulty airbags manufactured by Takata. The company’s airbags suffer a fault related to exposure to high levels of heat or humidity, with which means they have a tendency to explode when released under such circumstances.

This explosion shoots the airbag’s metal inflator outwards and in the direction of the person it was designed to protect, potentially causing further injuries or, in some cases, death.

Bayram, a Turkish army artillery lieutenant, was killed on Monday night while driving on the road between Kyrenia and Kythrea, which is colloquially known as the “mountain road”.

According to the Turkish Cypriot police, he was driving towards Kyrenia when his car collided head-on with a car being driven by a 31-year-old man.

He died at the scene, while his passenger, 26-year-old Oguzhan Kocyigit, was hospitalised.

The 31-year-old appeared in court on Friday, where a police representative said he had veered into oncoming traffic “due to carelessness”, hitting Bayram’s vehicle head-on.

He was released on a bail worth 50,000TL (€1,022), ordered to present himself at a police station once a week, and have a guarantor sign a bond worth 800,000TL (€16,348).

His body was repatriated to the Turkish city of Afyonkarahisar, where he was given a military funeral on Friday.

Faulty airbags have caused two other deaths in Cyprus, those of Styliani Giorgalli last year and Kyriakos Oxinos in 2023, while Alexandros Lougos has so far undergone 21 surgeries to restore his face after being involved in an accident in 2017.

Earlier in the year, Yarkiner had told the north’s transport services commission that the north has “no time to waste” over faulty Takata airbags, calling for a law to be passed to “place responsibility onto the vehicle users” and ensure that vehicles fitted with faulty airbags are “banned from traffic”.

Additionally, he told the north’s ‘transport minister’ Erhan Arikli that Takata airbags “explode like hand grenades” and warned that there are people who will be impacted by the airbags “other than those who we have already detected”.