Manama: At least 15 people were killed in a horrific accident between a bus and a truck on a Saudi highway on the first day of Ramadan.
“The operation room received a call at 5:52 pm (on Monday) about a bus-truck crash on the Riyadh-Al Qaseem highway,” Abdullah Al Muraibaidh, the spokesperson for the Red Crescent in the Riyadh region, said. “Fifteen medics and two planes were sent to help with the medical rescue efforts. There were 45 cases that included 15 deaths, five critical injuries, 14 moderate injuries and 11 light injuries. The victims were transported to specialized hospitals,” he said, quoted by Saudi news site Sabq.
According to reports, the bus caught fire after the crash and most of the casualties were foreigners. The road accident is the second in two months that killed 15 passengers.
In April, 15 people, including six children, were killed when two vans collided on the Wadi Bin Hashbal road, around 1,000km south of the capital Riyadh.
Local Civil Defence servicemen's efforts helped in limiting the casualties after they were able to rescue passengers trapped in one of the vans that caught fire in the accident.
Saudi authorities have been trying to reduce the high number of accidents in the country. Official figures indicate that a car accident happens every second and 17 people are killed in crashes every day on an average.
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.