NEWS FROM THE U.A.E.
SOURCE : THE NATIONAL
Driver faces charges after lorry crushes boy
Rickie Mathew, 9, was crossing the road, near Buhaira Corniche,when he was hit by a lorry.
SHARJAH - SEP 17: The driver of a cement mixer lorry that crushed a nine-year-old Sharjah boy to death is to face charges of involuntary manslaughter and reckless driving, police said tonight.
Rickie Mathew was crossing the road outside his home near Buhaira Corniche when he was hit by the lorry.
The Indian boy was on his way to a private lesson on Sunday afternoon at around 5pm.
“The driver, who is Indian and still in custody, admitted not looking behind him,” said a police spokesman.
“He felt that as it was a construction site no one would be behind him – he was mistaken. He will appear before Sharjah’s criminal court facing charges of reckless driving and involuntary manslaughter.”
Witnesses heard the boy, a pupil at Delhi Public School, screaming moments before he was dragged under the lorry’s rear wheels.
The driver told police he had not heard anything because of the noise from the lorry’s engine and the mixer.
“People at the construction site said the driver was in a rush and was reversing at faster than average speed for a truck that size,” the police spokesman said.
Family and friends paid tribute to the 10-year-old, describing him as a “fun-loving and charming boy”.
Vandana Marwaha, Rickie’s headmistress, said: “I have been with the family and they are in a state of shock. He was a very intelligent and friendly boy.
“Yesterday was supposed to be a day of celebration for the family since their daughter was being honoured by the school for excellence. They were all very excited about this.”
The boy’s older sister, Remi, had walked him part of the way to his lesson to see him across the roads.
“She left him in the sand area since it was safe and vehicles are just parked there,” said a family member, who asked not to be named.
As Rickie walked through the building site he was crushed under the reversing lorry’s back tyres.
Mari Muttu, an engineer at the site, telephoned the police. “The driver was in a state of panic and came running up to me but was not able to explain what happened,” he said. “When I went out, I saw the boy lying near the rear tyre. We immediately brought a plastic sheet from a neighbouring mosque and put it over him.”
Mr Muttu said safety signs and barriers had been put up around the site but these were usually ignored by parking motorists. “We started construction a month back and it is not a big site,” he said. “This is just an unfortunate incident.”
Saved from the flames
Abu Dhabi Fire - Three pulled from burning building
ABU DHABI - SEP 17:A young girl and two adults were airlifted to safety by helicopter today in a dramatic rescue from the roof of a blazing 16-storey apartment block in the centre of the capital.
The fire is thought to have broken out at around 12.45pm in what appeared to be makeshift rooftop accommodation on the Fathima Supermarket building in Airport Road.
Thick smoke quickly engulfed the roof as the fire took hold in the 15th and 16th floors.
Firemen, hampered by parked cars and hundreds of passers-by who were watching the drama unfold, managed to evacuate the building.
Children wearing paper face masks to protect them from the dangerous fumes were led out to safety.
A reporter and photographer from The National who had climbed onto a neighbouring roof spotted a Filipino man and an Arab woman and her daughter trapped on top of the burning building. They immediately alerted the emergency services.
Within minutes, a fire engine had positioned itself below the blaze but its ladder was only able to reach the 13th floor – three metres short of the rooftop.
At this point an army and a police helicopter were dispatched.
On the roof the woman shouted in Arabic to the reporter: “Saedna (help us). There is fire outside my door and smoke is coming into my flat. I am too scared to go to the door.”
Four metres away, across a rooftop wall, the Filipino man, who had a white towel wrapped around his head to protect him from the smoke, yelled: “I was asleep and just woke up. I can feel the heat and can’t get close enough to the door to shout to the firemen.”
Minutes later the police helicopter carefully manoeuvred into place and a rescuer winched the young girl and then her mother to safety.
A larger helicopter from the UAE armed forces picked up the man. Its strong downdraught dislodged a satellite dish that fell to the ground.
Nour Omar, who lives on the 10th floor, said: “I was sleeping when I woke up and saw smoke outside my window. I ran to wake up my mother and sister and dialled 999 and was told to get out of the building as quickly as possible.”
While the cause of the blaze remains unknown, a woman resident, who asked not to be named, said she had heard it started in a faulty air conditioning unit in one of the houses built on the roof.
A man who gave his name as Nishab, who has worked in the supermarket on the building’s ground floor for four years, said it was an old structure. The makeshift rooftop dwellings were apparently jokingly referred to as “the penthouse” and one or two were occupied, he added.
It took firemen about an hour and a half to extinguish the blaze. No one was killed, although several residents and two firemen were treated at Sheikh Khalifa Hospital.
Several firemen were also treated at the scene suffering from exhaustion attributed to smoke inhalation and their day-long Ramadan fast.
Mohammed al Niami, head of Abu Dhabi’s Quick Intervention Team, a new rescue unit trained to tackle large-scale emergencies, said his first priority was to evacuate the top two floors of the building, which were engulfed in smoke and ash. “We didn’t have any problems fighting the fire because it was under control. Smoke was the main problem.”
He added that several firemen had collapsed. “It was in Ramadan and they were fasting and they needed water,” he said. “Some of them collapsed unconscious because they were fasting. It was a small problem – they were given food and water.”
The large-scale emergency required co-operation from several branches of the Abu Dhabi emergency services. Eight fire engines from five stations across the city attended the scene with a number of ambulances and two “bus” ambulances, provided by the Emergency and Public Safety Department, to treat light injuries.
“There was good co-operation between us and civil defence, the owner of the building and the owners of the helicopters,” said Mr Niami.
Jane, a resident in a neighbouring building who refused to give her last name, reported seeing emergency vehicles struggle with the chaotic parking outside apartment block. “I’m really concerned,” she said.
“Fire trucks and ambulances should be able to come through. In case of emergencies, how are people supposed to get there?”
Banks home in on security breach
UAE - SEP. 17:An investigation by financial institutions into a recent security breach of private ATM card data points to the problem originating with one UAE-based bank, according to people familiar with the investigation into the problem.
Sensitive information including personal identification numbers (PINs) and data from the black magnetic strip on the back of cards was stolen from the bank and then used to make large numbers of fraudulent transactions, mainly from other countries.
“We’re quite close to having completed the case for the prosecution,” said one banker, who spoke only on the condition he neither he or his bank be identified. “And we have a fairly clear idea of how this has occurred.”
Bankers believe that thieves breached a network that banks use to share ATM data. That exposed most, if not all, banks in the UAE to the fraud.
A senior banker said the sheer complexity of the fraud and the amount of detailed knowledge lifted had all but ruled out as culprits computer hackers and conventional methods of fraud such as skimming, a practice that involves illegally attaching a cardreader to an ATM to collecting card information.
“If by hacker you mean someone who is externally breaking into a system electronically, I doubt very much that that’s the case,” he said, asking not to be named for security reasons.
“This is more likely to be either an inside job or someone has gained access to a server or a bit of hardware for a period of time, which could be a service engineer or someone like this who has direct access,” he added.
As the scale of the fraud has unfolded, some bankers have complained of a lack of guidance from the UAE central bank, whose duties include banking oversight.
The sophistication of the fraudsters was unlike anything the country and the central bank had dealt with before, the senior banker said.
There have been a number of breaches of ATM networks in the UAE in the past, but none has affected so many cardholders. “This is quite complex and quite sophisticated,” the official said. “So one might imagine that the central bank is struggling to understand it.”
In an email message to The National, the office of the governor of the central bank wrote that the current spate of fraudulent activity was outside its purview. “The said subject is related to banks’ security systems, not the central bank,” it said.
Several banks said they were nearing the conclusion of their internal inquiries, the results of which would be shared with others in the industry.
Any bank found responsible for the breach could be held liable for the losses, which have not yet been quantified.
A senior executive at another bank said his company had already engaged in talks with one bank thought to have been the origin of the breach. “There are discussions about compensation,” he said.
The police have yet to become involved in the investigation.
Banks began sending mass text messages to hundreds of thousands of customers last week asking them to change their PIN codes last week, after fraudsters based in foreign countries made unlawful transactions from UAE accounts. Confusing messages and conflicting instructions by banks caused long customer queues at ATMs and generated considerable public uncertainty.
Some banks have restricted all or partial international usage of their cards, for example, while others have lowered their withdrawal limits without notifying customers.
Banking sources said one bank told other financial institutions last week that it had begun an internal investigation after being notified of the breach by card networks and banks.
An executive at a major bank questioned the wisdom of sending text messages, saying it caused undue panic since the losses that banks had incurred were relatively small.