The parents of a three-year-old boy who fell to his death on Saturday evening from the sixth-floor apartment in which the family lived were remanded in custody for five days as a case of causing death through negligence is investigated.

It is extremely difficult to understand the reasoning of the police in seeking a remand order of five days against the grief-stricken parents and the wisdom of the judge in granting the police request. Would the police require five days to complete their investigation of a tragic accident or is there a danger of the ‘suspects’ influencing witnesses that could be used by the prosecution?

This is the second time recently that police have acted with such callousness towards bereaved parents. In mid-July, they sought and secured an eight-day remand for a 37-year-old British man after his three-year-old son fell out of an open window, next to the lift, on the fourth floor of a hotel in the Paphos district. There was no investigation of the hotel’s safety standards, but the father was subjected to toxicology tests to establish whether he was inebriated when the accident happened.

The man is due to appear in court to face charges on Thursday even though his lawyer had written to the attorney-general seeking a suspension of prosecution, which is understandable, considering this was an accident and a not criminal offence.

The grieving African couple have now been given the same treatment as the British father, but in the former case both parents are considered ‘suspects’ as they were both in the flat at the time their son fell. It is unknown if they were also subjected to toxicology tests as part of the police effort to turn tragic accidents into criminal acts that must be prosecuted.

Why are the authorities so eager to treat tragic accidents as criminal acts that must be investigated? Is it because they have come under attack for their failures of the past, such as the Thanasis case, that they have gone to the other extreme, treating tragic accidents as suspicious and arresting distraught parents as suspects? Have the parents in these cases not suffered enough without also being regarded as suspects?

We do not want to believe that the police were so keen to arrest the parents in these two cases because they were foreigners. Perhaps they would have displayed the same insensitivity if there was a similar tragedy involving a Cypriot family, because nowadays society cannot accept that in life tragic accidents happen. Someone must be to blame, but there is something wrong about treating people like suspected criminals immediately after they have suffered the worst event of their life.