23-Vehicle Pile-Up and Fire in Fujairah, UAE, Kills 14 and Injures 30
A major pile-up in the United Arab Emirates late on November 11 killed 14 people and injured 30 at the entrance to the emirate of Fujairah. Fujairah Police said a truck driver lost control on Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Road, struck another vehicle, overturned and hit several vehicles that had stopped in slow-moving traffic; the truck caught fire and the flames spread to a number of damaged vehicles. The UAE Ministry of Interior said on November 12 that 23 vehicles were involved in all, 18 cars and five trucks.
Police said the dead included Emirati nationals, while the identities of several other victims were still being established through DNA testing, and no complete breakdown of the dead by nationality has been released. The injured include nationals of the UAE, Oman, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt. Fifteen of the 30 injured have been discharged from hospital, while the other 15 remain under treatment. The Consulate General of India in Dubai confirmed that several Indian nationals were among the dead.
The crash happened near the entrance to Fujairah, on the main road into the emirate from Dubai and Sharjah. After the police operations room received the report, specialist police teams, ambulance and rescue crews and civil defence personnel responded to the scene.
Fujairah Police said technical and legal investigations are continuing to establish why the truck driver lost control. The Interior Ministry said its casualty figures are preliminary and could change as identification work continues, and urged the public not to circulate unverified claims about the victims or the toll. Reuters described the crash as one of the deadliest road accidents in the UAE in recent years.
Source: UAE Ministry of Interior
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：迪拜通往富查伊拉的公路（资料图，非事故现场）。图片来源：Rizwan Ullah Wazir 摄，CC BY 3.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。Photo: The Dubai-Fujairah road (file photo, not the crash scene). Image: Rizwan Ullah Wazir, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
