A new twist in last week's road-collision death of a man and an unrelated woman in his car may exonerate members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice who were suspected to have chased the vehicle. Al-Watan Arabic daily cited an unidentified senior Commission officer as saying that two young men who had tipped off the police and the Commission had chased the car for about 35 kilometers until tragedy struck: the fleeing car took a turn into oncoming traffic on the Tabuk-Madina Road and burst into flames on smashing into a speeding lorry. Both the occupants of the car died on the spot. The truck driver escaped uninjured. The Commission source told Al-Watan that investigators were looking into whether the two young men who had tipped off the police knew the young man with the woman and had a motive. The new turn of events contradict earlier reports implicating two Commission men in an SUV who allegedly tailgated the car. It now appears that one of the two young men had informed the security patrol about the young man accompanying an unrelated girl in his car. “At this point the security patrol advised the young man to get in touch with the Commission on the grounds that it was the authority responsible for such cases,” the source told Al-Watan. The source said that the Commission, on being alerted, assigned a two-man field patrol to the case, who were at that time monitoring an area near a girls' school. As they set out, the Commission men called the young man who said the fleeing car had passed the Khaledia checkpoint from where the stretch to Madina starts. The source said the young man called the Commission's staffers soon afterwards, telling them that the car had changed its direction at a point 35 km away from the town. Clearly, from the phone calls, it is evident that the young man was following the car. The Commission source said its two patrolmen soon saw the car speeding towards Madina and suddenly taking the opposite track setting back to Tabuk. “At this point the staffers contacted the police patrol operation center telling it that the car was heading for Tabuk,” the source said. Then, within minutes of this conversation, the Commission men saw a car burst into flames after hitting a truck. “They reported this development to the security patrol but without realizing that the burning car was the one they were looking for, and so they drove back to Tabuk town,” the source said. The source said a police patrol rushed to the scene to investigate and record witness testimonies, and it sought the help of Sheikh Farhan Al-Enezi, the Head of the Commission at Al-Worood because the two Commission patrolmen were working under its jurisdiction and the police needed to speak with them in order to trace the caller who had tipped them off. The source said that Sheikh Al-Enezi then called on M. Al-Shammari, one of the two young men who had reported the incident. He initially tried to deny it all but a passerby testified that Al-Shammari had borrowed his mobile phone to call the Commission. “When they summoned him to appear before the police to give his testimony, he refused to come saying that he was out of town, in Taima,” the source said. “But he and his colleague soon caved in and surrendered under pressure from the police and Sheikh Al-Enzi.” Another breakthrough in identifying the girl in the case came when police found 10 numbers in her mobile phone, belonging to people in Tabuk. On investigating, it appeared that the girl had used a different name with each one of the 10 people, offering no clue as to how to trace her real identity. __
