Two ghastly accidents that claimed the lives of 10 people threw the spotlight yet again on the urgent need to find ways to bring down the traffic accident death rate in Saudi Arabia, which is among the highest in the world. On the Ahsa-Khurais Road Friday evening eight people in a bus that smashed into a truck near Hajrat Al-Hani were charred to death, police said. The impact was so powerful that the bus burst into flames and there was little left of it but for a mangled heap of metal. Police could neither identify the victims from the charred remains nor the make of the bus from what was left of it. Some 270,000 vehicle accidents occur every year in Saudi Arabia, the highest in the GCC and other Arab countries, according to official statistics. One person dies and eight people are injured in road accidents every two hours on an average in the Kingdom. In another accident, late Friday two motorists were killed when their cars collided head-on on the Yanbu Al-Nakhal Road, Saturday. Rescuers had to cut through the metal to extract the bodies of the drivers.
