Boy suffers minor bruises

He was with me working on some fishing nets and suddenly he ran to a nearby food shop. I didn’t pay attention when he left.”

Al Mahrami added that his son was hospitalised at Khoula Hospital and was discharged on the same day as he luckily suffered only minor bruises. “I took him to a nearby clinic and then he was transported by ambulance to Khoula Hospital.”

However, Al Mahrami didn’t ask for any compensation from the driver who ran over Awas. “It was not his fault and because of that I forgave him,” he continued.

An official at the Royal Oman Police (ROP) has confirmed the incident without giving further details.

Ali Al Barwani, CEO of the Oman Road Safety Association, said that the boy survived because of the mercy of God.

“We really have to thank God here because he is such a small boy and at that age, children are quite weak so anything could have happened and the parents would have had to suffer so much pain,” he said, speaking to the Times of Oman. “I have said before that children are not responsible for their own safety because they are small and they don’t know what is correct and what is wrong. They don’t know that running onto the road is wrong and so we have to always educate them and inform them. “To all parents, I say, never, ever, ever leave your children alone, especially near a road. We see this almost every day in shopping malls, where parents are taking their trollies and unloading things into the car and the children are just running around. There are a lot of cars there and it only takes one second for something to go wrong.

“Put the child in the car first and then unload your trolley. At least in the shopping malls, cars are not speeding, but on the open road, cars move fast.

“I would therefore say it is important to install proper traffic regulating controls such as speed breakers and cameras on the roads so that parents, children and motorists can drive and live in peace,” he added.