An official said Sunday that more than 19 people die daily in traffic accidents in the Kingdom which has the unenviable record of one of the highest levels of accident-related fatalities in the world.

General Director of the General Traffic Department Maj. Gen. Abdul Rahman Al-Muqbil said: “Saudi Arabia loses more than 7,000 people every year in traffic accidents while injuries exceed 35,000 of which half are permanent disabilities.”

The General Traffic Department and the General Command of Security Aviation in the Ministry of Interior implemented last Monday traffic control from the air in a number of main streets in Riyadh and Jeddah as a first stage of the plan.

The aim was to raise security services and control traffic during rush hours. Traffic reconnaissance teams provided the traffic control command centers with information about vehicular movement on all streets and especially those without surveillance cameras.

This comes in the wake of a series of car accidents of which the latest happened this month when a group of cars collided at a police check point on the Kharj- Riyadh highway resulting in a number of deaths and injuries.