JEDDAH, 20 April — Seven members of a Saudi family were killed and seven other members injured in a major accident near Taif on Thursday. The accident occurred when their car rammed into a concrete barrier on the Himdha bridge along the Taif-Abha Road.
One of the injured, a 20-year-old girl, is in a coma in King Faisal Hospital in Taif. Another girl is also in serious condition.
According to Al-Watan newspaper, the injured were trapped inside the car, which caught fire as a result of the impact of the accident.
Civil Defense teams, which arrived at the scene soon after the accident, put out the fire and removed the dead and injured from the car.
The accident took place in Shaqsan, about 50 kilometers south of Taif, at 1:30 a.m. while the family was returning from Taif after attending a function.
The car they were traveling in apparently skidded and then hit the concrete barrier, killing six people on the spot and another in hospital. It was one of the worst accidents ever on the road, and it blocked traffic for more than two hours.
Safeer Al-Joaid, head of the family, and his three sons, were traveling in another car and had reached home minutes before the appalling accident.
While expressing his sorrow over the death of his family members, Al-Joaid urged the authorities to do something to put an end to the growing number of accidents on the Taif-Abha Road (Southern Road). Naif Safar Al-Joaid, a close relative of the bereaved, told Al-Watan that every family in the region has lost someone in an accident on the road.
Dr. Osama Dhafer, director of King Faisal Hospital, said the hospital had sent an emergency unit to the spot soon after hearing about the accident. He said the hospital had called a number of doctors, nurses and technicians on special duty to handle the emergency.
In another accident, a Makkah family lost three of its sons when their car overturned while returning from the township of Raniya on Wednesday.
