Judge sends driver whose truck killed 6 to house arrest

The truck driver involved in an accident that killed six people in the northern city of Haifa last week was sent to house arrest on Thursday, after a 24-hour waiting period.

During a court session Wednesday, police said there was no doubt that the crash was accidental, but noted that the driver’s release could compromise the ongoing investigation. The judge agreed at the time to keep the driver in custody for 24 more hours for police to prove such danger existed. On Thursday the court denied police requests to further remand him.

The 30-year-old driver, Jamal Abu Siam, was accompanied in court by his family. At one point on Wednesday he broke into tears in front of the cameras. Siam said he wanted “to ask forgiveness from all of the families. I’m sorry for what happened.”

The judge ruled that Siam should be released to two weeks of house arrest at his uncle’s house, with a number of restrictions placed on him — including that he is forbidden from contacting the company for which he worked and the quarry whence he drove before the fatal accident.

At the time of the horrific crash, the truck was about 25 percent overweight and shouldn’t have been on the road, police said after an initial investigation.

They further said that the driver had 16 prior violations, some of them for driving a vehicle found to be faulty. However, those violations were spread out over more than a dozen years, and he shouldn’t be considered a “dangerous driver,” a police officer told Army Radio last week.

At first it was thought that the driver could have been intentionally attacking bystanders, but the suspicions were quickly dispelled. On Wednesday police told the court there was “no doubt” the deaths were the result of a tragic accident, citing testimonies which said the driver gestured out the window and shouted to people nearby to “get out of the way” after he lost his brakes.