Smash victims not wearing seatbelts, say police

By ALAN PERROTT AND PATRICK GOWER

An Iraqi family that lost four members in a two-car smash in the Waikato were on their way home from celebrating the holy month of Ramadan in Wellington when the accident happened.

A Pakuranga mother and her three children died in the crash last night at 7.30 pm on State Highway 1 between Hamilton and Cambridge, and the father was critically hurt.

Fatima Mohamed, 6, Miriam Mohamed, 3, and Mohamed Mohamed, 9 months, died at the scene and their mother, Sanna Hussein, 27, died in hospital. Her husband, Mohamed Hussien Salah, is in a critical but stable condition in Waikato Hospital.

The family were more than seven hours into a trip home when their car and an oncoming vehicle were in collision.

Police say it appears the victims who died were unrestrained. One or two of the unrestrained children were thrown from the car and the other was flung around inside the vehicle. The mother was also thought to have been propelled through the windscreen.

Two people in the other car were moderately hurt.

The crash occurred outside St Peters School, north of Cambridge, and 5km from where four members of Auckland woman Janine Brooks' family died on Christmas Eve last year.

The staunchly Islamic Mohamed family had just spent two days in Wellington for festivals marking the end of Ramadan and had left Wellington at noon in their 1988 Toyota Corona saloon to rejoin the rest of their family for Christmas.

They had been staying with a friend, Majid Mohamed, who told the Herald that the family had made the journey from Auckland to Wellington several times.

Sanna and Hussien fled Iraq 11 years ago and spent seven years in a United Nations refugee camp in Saudi Arabia before coming to New Zealand with eldest daughter Fatima.

Sanna's brother Hussein Hussein said the rest of the family were devastated and he was struggling to recover from having to identify the bodies.

"My sister was a very happy person. She was looking forward very much to Christmas. We were all here waiting for them to come home. Now I think Christmas will be bad, very bad. We have lost three children and my sister."

He said his brother-in-law was distraught. "When he wakes he can't talk, he can't see anything. I think it will be very, very bad for him."

Relatives will gather tomorrow at their mosque in Auckland to pray.

Sergeant Lex Soepnel, of Te Awamutu, said it was likely the four victims who died might have survived if they had been restrained.

"The bottom line is if they were properly restrained, then we probably wouldn't have had four deaths," he said yesterday.

"Nobody wants to see a lying dead on the ground for no reason, especially at this time of the year."

Wearing seatbelts in the front seat of a vehicle became compulsory in 1974, rear seats in 1979, and child seat restraints became compulsory in 1995.

Children under 5 are legally required to be in car seats.

In last year's accident near the same area, Marjorie Brooks, her pregnant daughter, Tanya Campbell, Tanya's husband, Paul Campbell, and their 4-year-old daughter, Renee, were killed when Mrs Brooks' daughter, Janine, crashed into another vehicle on the same road.

Brooks was this week found guilty of four charges of careless driving causing death and two charges of careless driving causing injury.

She was sentenced to 75 hours' community service and disqualified from driving for 12 months.