Five dead, one child critical in two-vehicle collision

AMMAN — Five people, including two Saudi nationals, were killed and a child was critically injured in a road accident on the Zarqa-Azraq highway over the weekend, police and Civil Defence Department (CDD) officials said Saturday.

The accident, which occurred late Friday night on a two-lane road and involved a Jordanian pickup truck and a Saudi vehicle, resulted in the immediate death of five people, a senior traffic official source said.

“The sole survivor was a 10-year-old child who was in the pickup truck and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he is listed in critical condition,” the senior police official told The Jordan Times.

The strong impact caused the Saudi vehicle to erupt in flames and its two passengers were burned to death, a CDD official said.

“Our rescue and fire trucks rushed to the scene and extinguished the flames, and used special equipment to cut the vehicles and pull the bodies and the sole survivor out,” he added.

The traffic official said the Saudi vehicle’s driver “was at fault because he was speeding and took a wrong turn crashing head on with the pickup truck”. 

This is the second road accident to claim a high number of casualties in the Kingdom within a week.  Last Monday, two road accidents in the southern region left seven dead, including three brothers, and two injured.

In another accident on Friday, a 50-year-old man died in a collision involving three vehicles in Zarqa Governorate, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported. 

Road accidents over the past decade have killed 7,869 people and injured 171,143 in the Kingdom, according to Public Security Department estimates.

Around 11,004 accidents associated with human injury were registered in 2012, according to official figures.

The number of road-related deaths in Jordan stood at 816 in the same year. Overall, there were 17,143 injuries related to traffic accidents in the country.

In 2011, more than 142,000 accidents took place in Jordan, resulting in 694 fatalities and 18,122 injuries, while financial losses amounted to about $440 million (around JD311 million).