Authorities are investigating a peculiar incident involving bullets found in Larnaca General Hospital toilets. Approximately 20 rounds of various calibres were discovered in a plastic bag in the women’s toilets at the Outpatient Clinics by a hospital cleaner on Tuesday.
Upon notification, Larnaca CID members swiftly arrived at the scene to collect the items. Among the ammunition retrieved were tracer rounds, dummy rounds, and live cartridges, including 7.62 ammunition typically used in National Guard military rifles.
The National Guard has been alerted to ascertain whether these bullets originated from a military camp and if they are part of the material issued to sentries. However, this theory is deemed unlikely, as some of the ammunition found is of a calibre not distributed to soldiers.
The collected items have been sent for ballistic examination and specialised DNA testing, aiming to trace the individual who abandoned the bullets in the hospital’s facilities. In the meantime, police are reviewing the list of patients who visited the outpatient clinics to gather more information while awaiting test results.
In a statement on Ant1’s midday programme, Charalambos Charilaou, press spokesman for the SHSO, expressed concern over the incident. He emphasised that hospitals should be safe spaces for patients, not venues for potential criminal activity. “Hospitals are neither prisons nor correctional institutions where you check at the entrance whether someone is carrying a pistol, weapon or bullets,” he stated. “They are hospitals, and there is a police presence at these facilities. Hospitals are not detention centres where you conduct body searches on everyone who enters.”
When questioned about the potential for CCTV footage capturing the movements of the individual who left the bullets, Charilaou pointed out that cameras are not installed in every area of the hospital. Additionally, where cameras do exist, there is often no image retention, as storing footage requires permission from the Data Protection Commissioner.
