NEWS FROM THE UAE
SOURCE : THE NATIONAL

Lorries banned from Salam Street

Abu Dhabi - FEB. - 15: Lorries travelling between Musaffah and the Meena Port area will be banned from driving through the city centre, authorities said yesterday.

From Thursday, lorries coming from the industrial area should travel to the port area via the recently opened Sheikh Khalifa Bridge and vice versa, Abu Dhabi Municipality said. Those who break the rule will be fined, the authority said in a statement, though fine amounts were not disclosed.

The move is expected to relieve congestion on the island, particularly in the Tourist Club area and along Salam Street, which is being streamlined at a cost of Dh5 billion. A ban on lorries over 2.5 tonnes entering the island from 6am to 8am, as well as from 1pm to 3pm, will continue, the municipality said.

All traffic accessing the port via Salam Street has been diverted to a road passing in front of Abu Dhabi Mall, which is badly jammed during rush hour.

Since work began on Salam Street, shop owners and residents have complained about the impact on businesses and the extra traffic congestion in an already busy zone.

Sami al Mandhari, 25, who works at the HSBC building near the Abu Dhabi Municipality building at the Salam Street and Al Falah Street junction, said clients had been insisting on meeting at the bank’s main branch on Airport Road rather than come to his location.

“They are refusing to come here,” said Mr al Mandhari.

He said a ban on lorries would definitely help ease the congestion.

“We are getting a lot of lorries,” he said. “The traffic, you can see the whole way is blocked.”

Helen Rashid, owner of Helen Beauty Centre, said her business had suffered so much that she chose to relocate her make-up and tattoo parlour to Airport Road near Al Saada Street.

While she said the move was too late for her, she thought the decision should benefit shop owners still on Salam Street.

“Nobody can come to me there,” she said, adding that the lorries were a big part of the congestion.

Tom Thomas, the general manager of the haulage company ADSO, which has lorries operating out of Musaffah, said his drivers had already been advised to use the Sheikh Khalifa Bridge route, which opened on October 14, to avoid congestion in the city.

“It is good that city congestion can be avoided,” he said. “The road construction is creating a big difficulty for us. Maybe we will have to travel a little more distance, but if it is safe, we will be using that only.”

The opening of the Sheikh Khalifa Bridge paved the way for a new route off the island. The 10-lane road creates a bypass around Abu Dhabi Island from the E10 motorway.

The 27km route offers drivers a high-speed link between Port Zayed, near the Corniche, and the motorway in the Shahama district. It passes through some of the highest-profile development projects in the country, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Louvre Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island, designed to be the cultural centre of the capital. Lorry drivers going to Musaffah will now have to pass through Raha Street, the Yas Island intersection and Saadiyat Island before crossing the bridge to enter the port area, the municipality said.

The diversion is a substitute to the current route using Maqta Bridge to reach Salam Street.

Variable sign boards will be set up to direct lorry drivers, an official working on the Salam Street project said.

Work on the two-year Salam Street project is expected to be completed by October, with some sections ready for vehicles in May.

When completed, the project will create a freeway that allows vehicles to travel from the Meena area to the under-construction Sheikh Zayed Bridge without facing a traffic signal and will carry double the amount of vehicles that the Salam Street could handle.

Its centrepiece, a 3.2km tunnel running under Salam Street from Meena Road to Al Falah Street, will be the last of the work to be completed.

The last available lanes of Salam Street in the Tourist Club Area were closed in December to allow for excavation work.

 
Police arrest parents of baby found abandoned in Ajman

AJMAN - FEB. 15: The parents of a baby found abandoned in a pram on the Corniche on February 6 have been arrested, police said yesterday.

The woman, a Filipina in her early 30s, told police she had abandoned her child in desperation after learning of the strict laws on giving birth out of wedlock.

Brig Ali Alwan, director general of Ajman Police, said she told police that the baby’s Pakistani father wanted nothing to do with her or their child. The man, also in his early 30s, confessed that he is the father, according to police.

The case file has been handed to Ajman Public Prosecution and the two are in police custody, where the woman has been reunited with her daughter.

An official from Ajman Public Prosecution, who did not give his name, said the couple would soon appear in court on charges of adultery and putting a child’s life in danger. Under federal law the minimum prison term for each offence is one year.

Earlier Story

  
Hunt for mother of abandoned baby

The baby girl, thought to be about three months old and of Arabic origin, was discovered on Saturday evening in a baby carrier that had been left on a bench on the Corniche.

A resident noticed that the infant had been left unattended for about an hour and called the police, who took the baby to Sheikh Khalifa Hospital, where she is being cared for.

“No one has come up to claim the baby for more than 24 hours now, and that creates suspicion that she was abandoned,” a police source said.

Anyone who recognises the baby or believes they know who her parents or guardians are, is asked to contact Ajman Police at 06 743 9999.

Police officer spells out letters of the law

ABU DHABI - FEB 15: Lt Col Salah Alghoul’s job is to lay down the law. For legislation to be effective, the people it applies to need to know of its existence, understand what it means and know when they are breaking it.

But in a nation with a majority migrant population, made up of such disparate groups as tourists, labourers, expatriates and Emiratis, ensuring everyone appreciates what it takes to remain a law-abiding citizen is a complex procedure. And that is where Col Alghoul comes in.

As director of the Office of Culture of Respect for Law, part of the Ministry of Interior, it is his responsibility to ensure the laws of the land are understood.

Speaking for the first time about his role, he said: “Rights and responsibilities, rights and duties: the law applies to everybody; everybody has to obey our law. Nobody will be arrested unless they break the law.”

His department was established early last year to raise awareness about the legal and social aspects of laws. And the focus has been to make sure everyone, regardless of their position in society, appreciates how it works.

“A lot of people are ignorant of the law,” he said. “There is a legal rule that says as long as the law has been introduced, people have to abide by it whether they are aware of it or not. However, the Ministry of Interior realised this was not enough.

“In order to reduce the rate of crime, we should reach out to people and get them to understand the law – their rights as well as their duties.”

Now, a cluster of 10 officers is using various tools, from workshops with community police to lectures at labour camps, to spread the message. Some of the initiatives are already under way in schools and teach children to respect the law by understanding it first. Audio and video programmes make students aware of traffic rules as well as how to treat their housemaids with respect.

Col Alghoul said the new approach was intended to go beyond “arrest and investigate”.

“We are now service providers. And of course, we cannot see the results within months or even within years.”

He said an entire generation would need to be educated in order to achieve the department’s goals.

As part of his research on implementing an educational programme, Col Alghoul, an academic, spent two months travelling to countries such as Australia, Singapore and France to observe how their police interacted with their communities.

“Why is the respect of the law in those countries better than what we have in the Middle East?” The answer, he said, was education.

“We cannot come back here to a 50-year-old man and just ask him to respect the law,” he said. Instead, the Ministry needs to make sure people understand cause and effect.

“This is the law … if you break it, this is the punishment,” he said.

Col Alghoul added that the same message is sent to children via games in the curriculum.

The idea of outreach to workers, regardless of whether they are professionals or semi-skilled, literate or otherwise, culminated in the publication of a booklet called The Worker: Rights and Duties.

After conducting lectures in labour camps across the country, Col Alghoul and his officers spent some more time compiling frequently asked questions by labourers. Answers were then provided to police from Musaffah to Ajman so that officers were better equipped to help.

Ultimately, the questions and answers were turned into the first of a series of booklets, published in six languages: Arabic, English, Tagalog, Chinese, Urdu and Persian. The next booklet will also be published in Malayalam, an Indian language.

Lt Col Alghoul said the Ministry preferred to publish a series of booklets rather than publishing “30 pages and then workers would just throw it away”.

“We are doing it step by step,” he said.

The booklet touches upon aspects of working in the UAE. It reaffirms that workers are “free to practise your religion and this is according to the constitution”. It also explains that proselytising is prohibited.

Instructions on how to report a crime, how to sign a contract and what practices are illegal are also outlined.

“Foreigners are the majority here and come from different backgrounds, different levels of education. Some of them are illiterate and they are afraid of going to the police,” he said. “In the booklet we published, we focus on the criminal law aspect, not the labour or immigration law aspect.”

The workshops and lectures are aimed at workers who are illiterate so that they, too, are protected under the law.

“We do not claim we live in a paradise, but compared with other countries, it is fair enough what we have reached and what we are going to reach. We are on our way to reaching equality.”