‘Unsafe Vehicles’ Lead on Iranian Roads; Nearly Two People Die in Accidents Every Hour

The commander of Iran’s traffic police said “nearly two people die every hour due to road accidents in Iran,” and this comes as traffic authorities say that in many of these fatal incidents, vehicle safety systems are defective or not functioning properly.

Brigadier General Seyyed Kamal Hadiyanfar announced during an operational capability exercise of traffic police: “32 percent of traffic accident fatalities are passengers in vehicles who did not use seat belts, 25 percent are drivers who cause their own death and others’, motorcyclists account for 24 percent, and pedestrians account for 19 percent of other traffic fatalities.”

Fatal road accidents in Iran sometimes occur repeatedly on a specific route, and residents or drivers sometimes call such routes “death roads”; without any intervention from responsible authorities to prevent similar incidents from recurring.

Khuzestan is among the provinces with “death roads” and high accident rates. The CEO of the Red Crescent Society of Khuzestan said: “Khuzestan ranks second in the country for deaths caused by road accidents, and in the first ten months of the year, we had 510 deaths in provincial road accidents, which represents a 17 percent increase compared to last year.”

Two days ago, on December 20, 2021 at 7:40 AM, a fatal collision occurred at kilometer 10 of the Behbahan-Ahvaz route. Colonel Reza Dolatshahi, commander of Khuzestan’s highway police, explained: “49 vehicles collided with each other and three vehicles caught fire, in one of which a family of three and one passenger from another vehicle died at the scene.”

The commander of Iran’s traffic police also stated regarding the recent Behbahan incident: “In this very distressing Behbahan accident, not a single vehicle’s airbag deployed. Why are we producing death traps? Why aren’t standards being controlled? Why isn’t the Ministry of Industry controlling this? Definitely, automakers should be referred to judicial authorities in this incident. It’s true that drivers were not careful in the Behbahan accident, but what role did the relevant organizations play?”

Although the announced statistics on road deaths in Iran, reported annually as 17,000 people by the Forensic Medicine Organization, is a very high rate, recently Colonel Seyyed Hadi Hashemi, former commander of the road police, had said: “In traffic statistics with a new categorization of traffic casualties into type one and two accidents and new categories, they tried to not count many deaths as traffic casualties in order to lower the statistics, but this still didn’t happen.”