More questions than answers continue to swirl around the circumstances of the shocking drowning death of an 8-year-old girl this past week at one of northern Greece’s well-known overnight summer camps in Halkidiki prefecture.
Meanwhile, the girl’s devastated family is preparing legal action against the camp’s owners, while the latter’s management remains tight-lipped.
The family expressed its anger with the camp owner over its lack of communication with the family and the generally low level of information being provided.
In a report at OPEN news, the grandfather of the deceased child, Angelos Kazazis, said camp officials finally sent a brief message to the girl’s parents yesterday, expressing their condolences.
In the message, Kazazis notes the officials merely said, “They stand with us in our pain, nothing more.”
Meanwhile, the family is preparing a legal suit against the camp. “We will take legal action. We have people who will pursue legal action. Today it was our child. Tomorrow it could be someone else’s child,” he said.
About the Girl’s Death
The 8-year-old drowning victim was found dead in a pool at the summer camp in the village of Kriopigi (Kryopigi), Halkidiki prefecture, on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 13.
Emergency responders quickly removed her from the water, and two ambulances from the National Center for Emergency Care (EKAB), accompanied by a physician, arrived promptly.
In the wake of the tragedy, authorities arrested two individuals. Initially, a 19-year-old summer camp leader was taken into custody, along with the head of the summer camp, a 34-year-old.
The teen camp leader has since been released until her trial, following a decision by the relevant prosecutor.
Theories have swirled around the series of event that lead to her death, but a recent report on SKAI TV alleges that the girl may have been at the bottom of the pool for up to three hours without anyone noticing, until her sister began looking for her after lunchtime.
This is substantiated by a coroner’s report, which revealed that there were small remnants of food in the girl’s stomach, likely from her breakfast, indicating that the girl had not gone to the dining hall with the other children for lunch and snuck back into the pool unnoticed and unsupervised, as suggested by some reports.
The company responsible for the summer camp has issued a statement expressing profound grief over the camper’s death and has pledged full cooperation with the ongoing investigation into the circumstances surrounding the accident.
Camp ordered closed
In a later development on Monday afternoon, media reports cited that regional authorities responsible for Halkidiki prefecture ordered that the camp site be closed, in the wake of the latest reports that staff and youth leaders searched for the missing girl for three hours before locating her body at the bottom of the pool.
