JEDDAH: The death of a six-year-old Arab child in a private school van in Jeddah on Monday has left parents and the local community in a state of shock, with many calling for measures to prevent this from happening to other children.

Abdul Malik, the Grade 3 pupil, was forgotten on his school bus and died of suffocation on Monday.

Makkah police spokesman Col. Atti bin Attia Al-Qurashi told a local publication on Tuesday that the driver, an Asian national, was arrested.

Forensics experts had been dispatched to the school to determine the cause of Abdul Malik’s death.

The driver had reportedly dropped the children at school in the morning and then locked and parked the van nearby under the hot sun. When he went back to fetch the children at the end of the school day he saw that Abdul Malik was still in the bus.

Parents want the guilty parties held accountable for the death of the child. They said the school must introduce foolproof measures to ensure their children are safe, especially those in kindergarten.

The tragedy in Jeddah was reminiscent of a similar misfortune in 2010 in Dammam when a five-year-old expatriate girl, Fida Haris, died after being left unattended for five hours in a private vehicle in the full glare of the sun outside the International Indian School in Dammam (IISD).

She died in circumstances similar to that of Abdul Malik. Since then, the Indian school in Dammam has introduced a series of measure to avoid a similar tragedy.

“The most important among those measures was the introduction of text messaging services,” IISD Principal E.K. Mohammed Shaffe told Arab News on Wednesday. “Every day in the morning, between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m., when the class teacher notices that a particular child is absent, their parents are informed by sending an SMS to their registered cell phone.”

In the case of Fida Haris, the parents were under the impression that their daughter was at school. The teachers thought she was absent. “This text-messaging system instantly alerts the parents,” said Shaffe. “We learned our lessons from that tragedy. This messaging system program does not cost a lot.”

The system was then followed by other schools in Jeddah and even in Riyadh. Shaffe said the SMS system should be introduced at all schools. “If this private school in Jeddah had a system like ours, Abdul Malik would not have met the fate of Fida Haris,” he said, and added that his school was ready to share the details of the system with the education authorities.

“In addition to the text messaging system, two of our staff members check each and every school bus every morning to see if any child is left behind,” added Shaffe.