Acholi sub region registered 50 road accidents in April

Aswa River region registered 50 cases of road accidents in April, with Gulu registering the highest cases according to statistics.

Out of the 50 cases registered, 7 were fatal accidents, 33 serious injuries and 10 minor injury cases.

The Aswa River region police spokesperson, Patrick Jimmy Okema said Gulu district registered the highest accident cases of 32 with four fatal accidents, 20 serious and eight minor injury cases.

Okema said the causes of all the accidents are careless driving/riding and over speeding especially in places like junctions and joining a main road.

He added that most of these accident victims are boda-boda motorcyclists.

Okema said they are engage in massive sensitisation of boda-boda and drivers, operation, taking culprits to court among others to reduce accidents.

He added that last month, they carried out many operations on dangerous mechanical condition vehicles (DMCs) and the owners were penalized using the Express Penalty Scheme (EPS), but did not pay.

Okema said in the operation to crack down on DMCs, they have issued 501 EPS receipts which amounted to sh48,240,000 and they tracked down defaulters and recovered sh12,320,000.

He advised members of the public especially those who want to buy second vehicles to first liaise with the office of traffic to find out whether the vehicle has a pending EPS receipt to pay or not so that they don't incur expenses of the former owner.

Okema said such expenses will be on the person who bought the second hand vehicle even if he was not aware of it.

He added that most EPS defaulters are those that bought second hand vehicles when the owner incurred or traffic police wrote a receipt before, but failed to pay.