Saudi road crash kills 15, including six children
Riyadh: Fifteen people, including six children, were killed in a horrific road accident in southern Saudi Arabia.
The tragedy occurred late on Saturday when two vans collided on the Wadi Bin Hashbal road, around 1,000km south of the capital Riyadh, Ahmad Ebrahim Asiri, the spokesperson for the Red Crescent in the Asir region, said.
Local Civil Defence servicemen contributed to limiting the casualties after they were able to rescue passengers trapped in one of the vans that caught fire in the accident.
However, two other people were critically injured and were taken to a local hospital, Asiri added.
Saudi authorities have been pushing for an amelioration of the road culture that would help drastically reduce the high number of accidents in the country.
However, campaigns by the authorities to bring order to chaotic driving and boost a more positive traffic approach have often been resisted by unruly and speeding drivers.
A rigorous monitoring system with traffic cameras on highways to check speed and at the traffic lights in major cities to record red light jumping has succeeded in bringing down the number of accidents.
The authorities now plan to expand Saher, the monitoring cameras system, to all regions of the kingdom by 2018.
Attempts by unruly drivers to beat the system by seeking religious edicts to ban it on the grounds that it was robbing them of their savings have all been rejected by religious scholars.
Several religious figures insisted that cheating the system was not allowed and that all fines had to be paid. In their attempt to avoid the traffic monitoring lenses, some drivers used ruses to conceal their car licence plates, making their identification impossible.
However, the traffic authorities have recently said that they were installing advanced technology cameras to recognise violators. The locating plate recognition (LPR) system sensors are reportedly able to detect the numbers of the licence plates even when drivers tamper with them or cover them with paint or stickers to hide them.
Related Posts