JEDDAH, 31 January 2003 — The bus transport section of the International Indian School-Jeddah (IISJ) is once again being criticized after a seventh grade girl died while getting off a school bus here on Wednesday.
Several enraged parents demanded that the school administration discipline its drivers.
Inquiries show that 15-year-old Maiyada Naushad Khatib fell as the bus drove off after she alighted near her home in Shariaiyah on Wednesday afternoon.
The family maintained that the girl’s abaya and bag became entangled with the door as she was getting off the bus. She was a student of 7A1.
“Bruises on the left side of the face, swollen lips and a torn bag showed that she was dragged before she fell, hitting her face on the ground.
She lay bleeding heavily from her injuries when her younger sister Majida, who was traveling on the same bus, ran home to inform her father of her sister’s accident.
The girl’s father and his driver rushed her to Baksh Hospital where she died around 3 p.m., some 40 minutes after the accident,” Abdullah Khatib, the girl’s uncle, told Arab News.
Her father displayed the girl’s watch, which had stopped at 2.20, showing the time of the incident.
Majida, a student of 4A8, exited first and waited for a while but her sister was nowhere to be seen.
As the bus moved away she found her sister lying on the ground. “The driver stopped the vehicle only after the children had drawn the driver’s attention to the girl lying on the ground,” he said, adding that police came on the scene and arrested the driver, who was identified as P. Aziz from the southern Indian state of Kerala, Abdullah said.
According to Abdullah, the girl’s father had made several verbal complaints to the school administration demanding that the driver, who had a tendency to speed away unmindful of the safety of children when they boarded or alighted the bus, be disciplined.
Abdullah said Mehboob, his driver, was present every afternoon to receive the two girls returning from school. But he missed the girls on the day.
A large number of relatives, friends, teachers and officials visited the bereaved family yesterday after the girl was buried in a nearby cemetery.
Maiyada was a quiet girl and an above average student, her father recalls. She was the third of Naushad’s five children. Four of his children were born in Kuwait, and the last one, Majida, was born in Jeddah.
IISJ Director Brig. Iqbal Siddiqui, who also visited the family, told Arab News on the phone that the bus driver saw the girl lying on the ground in his rear view mirror as he was driving away. “He immediately stopped the vehicle and ran toward the girl.”
Inquiries show that this was the third case where a child has died due to the alleged carelessness of bus drivers in the recent past.
