It was a chaotic nightmare scene................Gassan's story

We had been in Nizwa all day filming a documentary and were eager to get back home to Muscat. The sun was setting as we loaded our gear into the car and by the time we reached the highway the sky was pitch black. We had not gone far when we were brought to a standstill by the red brake lights and hazard flashers of the cars in front. I first thought that a herd of goats was crossing the road, a common occurrence at this point, but as we got closer, I realized that there had just been a serious car crash. I pulled over and got out to see if I could help. My friend followed close behind.

It was a chaotic, nightmare scene. People were rushing around at the site of a head-on collision between a small Hyundai and a Toyota Camry. Three men were pulling the lifeless body of an Omani woman from the front seat of the Hyundai and bundling her into the back of a pick-up truck. Other men were lifting the male driver from behind the steering wheel. The bloodied body of a small boy already lay motionless in the back of the pick-up. I asked a man standing by the truck what had happened and he told me that the entire family in the Hyundai, including the boy who had been sitting in the back without a seatbelt, had died on impact. The bystanders were now searching for the head of a baby girl whom the mother had been carrying on her lap in the front seat. The collision had thrown the baby through the windscreen onto the road and decapitated her on impact. I looked around the car and noticed a small hole about the size of small watermelon in the windscreen. On the road in front of the car was a white cloth covering something. A man watching over it told me it was the baby’s body minus the head. It could not have been bigger than a shoe box.

I rushed back to my car and retrieved the torch that I keep for emergencies. Finding nothing around the crashed cars, I started to follow the crash debris scattered by the force of the collision down a nearby embankment. I continued walking, scanning the darkness with my torch in a semi circle back and forth. Far from the crash scene now, I was about to give up when suddenly my torchlight bounced off a bright object lying in the darkness. I approached and saw that it was the tiny baby’s head that everyone was looking for. She could not have been more than two months old. Her eyes were still slightly open and the small gold earrings she wore had reflected the light back from my torch. The force with which she had hit the tarmac had hurled her a full 60 metres! I took off my shirt and gently wrapped it around the head and walked back along the embankment. I handed the head to a man who seemed to be in charge at the accident scene. He placed it on the pick-up truck along with the rest of her body and sped off into the dark.

I went back to my car and, as I was putting on a clean shirt, I heard a woman screaming and sobbing uncontrollably. Another woman joined her and both collapsed distraught in the road. Someone told me that they were relatives of the dead. It seems that two cars from one family had left a house nearby the crash scene. One car went on ahead with the family in Hyundai following. The Hyundai driver, in a hurry to keep up with the first car, decided to overtake on a blind bend and was hit head-on by the Camry. A violent and tragic death was the price his young family paid for that reckless decision. The Camry driver, protected by his seatbelt and airbags, survived. My friend and I got back in the car and headed slowly back to Muscat and our waiting families in silence.