By Ramesh Mathew/Staff Reporter
With the tragic death of the five construction workers from Nepal in the under construction-Lusail Community development on Thursday, the number of casualties from road traffic accidents (RTA) in Qatar’s Nepalese community this year has risen to 24.
A senior official at the Nepal embassy in Doha said it is almost close to the highest annual figure of RTAs in the country’s Nepalese expatriate community in the last one decade which witnessed a massive swelling in the numbers of Nepalese labourers in Qatar.
The embassy sources also informed that in the last one month, at least 9 Nepalese expatriates died in road traffic accidents in Qatar, including the five on Thursday.
Another accident on Salwa Road on June 11 claimed the lives of three Nepalese labourers when the mini-bus that carried them back to their accommodation after a day’s work turned on its side after one of its tyres burst.
With the death of two of its nationals in the Lusail tragedy, the deaths from the RTAs in the Indian expatriate community have shot up to 12 so far. While one of the victims was in the country for only less than two months, the other had completed only eight months or so.
According to the inquiries made by this newspaper in recent months, the Nepalese constituted the largest number of RTA casualties in the country in recent years. It also found that most of the labourers who were killed in the accident on Thursday were relatively new to the country and the resident permits of at least three of them were still to be stamped by the manpower companies which recruited them.
While corroborating this, a Nepal embassy official said the inquiries that the mission made with the employers of the deceased found that at least three of them arrived in the country only about 45 days before the accident.
While Thursday’s accident in Lusail was the largest RTA in terms of casualties in recent years with seven of them losing lives, there were even larger tragedies than this, involving Nepalese.
Fourteen Nepalese were killed when an accommodation barge operated by a Dubai firm sank off the Doha coast on June 29, 2009. The accident also claimed the lives of 11 Indian nationals, in a total of 30 casualties.
Similarly, in September 2006, a group of seven Nepalese bachelors, all working for a computer maintenance firm were burned to death in Najma when their flat was destroyed in a fire.
Perhaps the 12 hours between 1pm on Thursday and 1am on the following day was the one that saw the maximum number of RTA deaths (13) in the country, as a group of six GCC nationals, including five Qatari youngsters were killed in another major traffic accident in Rawdat al-Rashid off Salwa Road, about 30km from Doha city.
