​Road accident rates in the Sultanate in the first five months of 2018 fell by 39.5 percent and death rates have shown a marginal decline, according to statistics released by the Centre.

Total accidents in Oman during January-May period of 2018 declined to 1,014, which is against 1,676 for the same period of 2017. Stringent traffic rules introduced by the Royal Oman Police (ROP), better awareness on traffic rules among drivers and new roads must have helped to reduce road accidents. Death cases edged down by 0.4 percent to 248 in the first five months of 2018, against 249 deaths for the same period of last year, shows NCSI report. As many as 143 Omanis lost their life during January-May period of 2018, against 172 people for the same period of last year, indicating a fall of 16.9 percent. However, death rate of expatriates rose by 36.4 percent to 105 from 77 during the period under review.

The number of people injured fell by 12.7 percent to 1,186 from 1,359 cases during the five-month period. Among the injured, 822 were Omanis and 364 were expatriates, showed NCSI data. As many as 640 people lost their life in 3,845 accidents in 2017.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ