Four other injured in crash on Rosh Pina- Kiryat Shmona Road.
By DAVID RUDGE
A 21 year-old soldier from the center of the country was killed and four other people were injured - one of them critically - in a crash between two commercial vehicles on the Rosh Pina to Kiryat Shmona road on Wednesday morning.
Dep.-Cmdr. Nabil Asawi, head of the Northern Region Traffic Department, said the pick-up truck in which the off-duty soldier was a passenger had skidded on the rain-soaked road on a bend and collided head-on with another pick-up truck travelling in the opposite direction.
"It appears that the driver of the commercial vehicle, who was apparently a friend of the soldier, was not driving in accordance with the road and weather conditions," Asawi told the The Jerusalem Post.
"As a result, the driver of the vehicle traveling southwards was lightly hurt and his passenger, the off-duty soldier, was killed and three people in the other vehicle were injured, one of them very seriously."
Asawi said it was not immediately clear if all of those involved in the crash had been wearing seat belts, but the matter was being investigated.
The crash occurred on the stretch of road between the Mahanayim junction and Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar. The road was closed for over an hour while Fire and Rescue Service teams worked to extricate a person who was trapped in one of the vehicles.
Magen David Adom paramedics treated the injured and took them by ambulance to Safed's Rebecca Sieff Hospital where one of them was reported to be in critical condition and the others were suffering from light-to-moderate injuries.
The death of the soldier brought to 378 the number of people killed in the ongoing carnage on the roads since the beginning of the year.
Traffic Dept. spokesman Supt. Doron Ben-Amo said that although this was a drop compared to the 424 people killed over the same period last year there was still a great deal to be done to prevent further deaths and casualties on the roads.