Fourteen people were killed and 30 injured in a multi-vehicle crash and fire on the Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed road near the entrance to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, authorities said.
The crash happened shortly before midnight on Wednesday — 20:00 GMT — Al Jazeera reported.
Police said the driver of a lorry lost control and struck another vehicle, and that both then veered off the road into several vehicles that were stationary in slow-moving traffic. The lorry caught fire and the flames spread to other damaged vehicles.
Al Jazeera puts the number of vehicles involved at 18 cars and five trucks. Hiru News reported that around 23 vehicles were caught up in the crash, citing Reuters — the same total, counted differently.
The casualties
Of the 30 people hurt, 15 were treated and discharged and 15 remained in hospital, according to Fujairah police. Both filings give the same split.
The dead include Emirati nationals and a number of foreigners, and authorities are running DNA tests to identify some of the bodies.
Al Jazeera lists the nationalities of the injured as citizens of the UAE, Oman, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt. No Sri Lankan nationals appear in that list, and neither filing reports any Sri Lankan among the dead or injured. Sri Lanka has a large migrant workforce in the Emirates, so the absence is worth stating — though neither outlet presents its list as complete.
Emergency response teams, civil defence units, ambulance services and police went to the scene to put out the fire, move the injured to hospital and secure the area.
Both filings describe it as among the deadliest road crashes in the UAE in recent years.
A note on the search field
Searches for this crash return a 2008 Emirates pile-up and a 2016 Oman crash with comparable death tolls near the top of the results. Those are different events from different years. The identifying details here are the date, the Fujairah location and the Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed road.
Not reported
Neither filing names any of the dead, gives the cause of the lorry driver’s loss of control, says whether the driver survived, or reports any charges or investigation beyond the police account of events.
