Limassol driver dies in foothills after missing turn

A man was killed instantly in a road accident in Limassol district on Saturday night when his vehicle veered off a curvy road in the mountain foothills and crashed into a tree.

According to police, 32-year-old Georgios Akritidis was driving southbound along the Platres-Limassol road Saturday evening around 9pm, when he failed to follow a curbed road near Lania village.

Akritidis, described as a Russian-born Cypriot citizen and an experienced car enthusiast who lived in Limassol, left a party at a village in the area before 9pm and was driving southbound, where police said at one point he failed to negotiate a curve and the car kept on going straight until it slammed into a tree.

Emergency responders from the fire department rushed to the scene where they managed to pull Akritidis from the wreckage, with an ambulance transporting the driver to Limassol General Hospital where doctors pronounced him dead on arrival.

A police report did not provide further details but local media said officials suspected speeding was a factor in the incident, while the driver was not believed to have been wearing his seatbelt at the time.

But traffic police official Emilios Kafas confirmed to reporters that there were tire friction marks on the road, suggesting Akritidis might have tried to correct his course but stopping short of saying whether skidmarks were definitively caused by braking.

“It is possible that the driver might have taken corrective action to bring the vehicle back and avoid the accident but he did not succeed,” Kafas said.

Previous incidents have been recorded in the area, including a fatality in August 2019 after an elderly man’s vehicle veered off the road outside Lania and fell into a ditch.