'Dead' tot reunited with parents

No-one knows how long little Bushr Al Tawashi wandered alone in the rubble of his home in the Syrian capital before rebel fighters found the toddler and handed him to another family to look after. Now the two-year-old is back with his parents - who believed he had been killed. In their chaotic haste to escape fighting between government troops and Syrian rebels, Bushr's parents had assumed the boy was picked up by other members of their extended family who were staying with them when clashes broke out last summer in the Damascus suburb of Al Kaboun. Heavy fighting prevented the parents from going back to search for Bushr once they arrived at a refugee camp and realised he was missing, said Stella Constantinou, a Cypriot lawyer. Believing he did not survive the shelling, the boy's grief-stricken father, Machhour Al Tawashi, and his wife, Arin Al Dakkar, arrived in Cyprus on August 6 along with their two other sons aged four and six, in search of asylum. Word the boy was safe eventually reached the parents, who now live in the coastal town of Limassol. "You can imagine how they felt when they were told their son was alive after bearing all this guilt thinking that he was...