The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia handles fatal-accident investigation in a structurally different way from any English-language jurisdiction earlier in this series. Where the United Kingdom uses HM Coroners, Australia state Coroners Courts, New Zealand Coronial Services, Ireland the Coroner Service, Canada provincial Chief Coroners, South Africa magisterial inquests, Singapore a State Coroner, and the UAE Public Prosecution + Forensic Medicine Department, Saudi Arabia's post-2017 reform placed death-investigation directly inside the Public Prosecution (النيابة العامة), an independent constitutional body reporting directly to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. There is no jury inquest. There is no separate coronial track. The criminal file and the death file are the same file from the moment the Public Prosecutor opens it.

Three statutory instruments do most of the work. Royal Decree No. M/51 of 23/8/1426H (2005) — the Labour Law, with the substantive 2024 amendments effective from late 2024 / early 2025 — sets the employer's OSH and incident-management duties. Royal Decree No. M/85 of 26/10/1428H (2008) — the Traffic Law, with Implementing Regulations under Council of Ministers Resolution No. 251 of 1437H — sets the road-traffic frame enforced by the General Directorate of Traffic under the Ministry of Interior, with the integrated automated enforcement and tracking through the Saher (ساهر) system. The criminal-law overlay sits in the Penal-Code-equivalent Sharia frame, applied through the Public Prosecution and the Court of First Instance with appeal to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court.

This article is for KSA fleet operators with between ten and fifty vehicles — Riyadh 2nd Industrial heavy-haulage SMEs, Sudair-belt mid-market operators, Eastern Province (Dammam, Al-Khobar, Jubail) industrial fleets, Jeddah-Mecca corridor logistics SMEs, and Eastern Aramco / SABIC supply-chain mid-market contractors. Operators large enough that an incident produces a real state response, but small enough that the General Manager personally answers the question "what does our maintenance file actually prove?".

The Public Prosecution after the 2017 reform

Royal Order No. A/240 of 11/9/1438H (June 2017) re-established the Bureau of Investigation and Public Prosecution as the Public Prosecution (النيابة العامة), an independent body reporting directly to the King. Public Prosecutors have constitutional authority to investigate, summon witnesses, order detention, request expert reports, and bring charges before the criminal courts. After a fatal industrial accident the file is opened automatically once the General Directorate of Traffic and the police forensic team report the death and the suspected breach of duty.

The Public Prosecutor receives the GDT investigation file, the police forensic medical report, the Ministry of Human Resources OSH inspector's preliminary findings, and the operator's commercial-licensing and insurance-position information from SAMA / Insurance Authority via standard inter-agency request. Witnesses are summoned for sworn testimony at the Public Prosecution's offices. The fleet operator's representative — typically the General Manager or Operations Manager — is summoned. Maintenance and inspection records are demanded by formal letter under the Code of Criminal Procedure (نظام الإجراءات الجزائية).

Refusal or non-production of records exposes the operator and the relevant officer to obstruction-of-justice consequences in addition to the underlying file. The post-2017 Public Prosecution is procedurally rigorous: the file is built systematically, the witnesses are interviewed in order, the documentary evidence is logged, and the decision to charge or to close is recorded with reasons.

The General Directorate of Traffic technical track

The GDT, operating under the Ministry of Interior, conducts the technical investigation of fleet-vehicle-involved fatalities. The investigation covers the immediate cause and mechanism of the incident, the vehicle's technical condition (brake-line wear, hydraulic-system condition, tyre tread, lighting, audible warnings, load restraint, parking-brake function, body and chassis integrity), the driver's licensing and qualification position, and the operator's licensing and supervisory position.

The integrated Saher system gives the GDT investigator a starting database: vehicle plate-history, driver-licensing history, prior accident events, prior traffic violations. The investigator builds the file from this base and adds the field examination, the witness interviews, and the operator's documentary record. The report goes to the Public Prosecution and supports the criminal-file decision.

The Ministry of Human Resources Labour-Law inspection running in parallel

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development conducts an OSH inspection under the Labour Law and its Implementing Regulations. The inspector's authority covers worksite OSH, employer duties of safe systems of work, training, supervision, and the documentation regime that supports each. Where the inspector concludes that the employer breached OSH obligations, the file may be referred to Public Prosecution as a separate or compounded charge, or proceed by way of administrative penalty under the Ministry's framework, or both.

The OSH-side questions are very specific:

  • Did the employer have a documented hazard identification and risk assessment for the activity in which the fatality occurred?
  • Did the employer provide and document training to relevant employees in the relevant language (Arabic for native-speaker workforce, with translation for non-Arabic-speaking workers as required)?
  • Did the employer maintain the vehicle and equipment to manufacturer specification, the Traffic Law and Implementing Regulations, and the OSH framework?
  • Did the employer maintain a documented incident-reporting and investigation system that produced contemporaneous records?
  • Was the supervisory and corporate-governance trail sufficient to demonstrate active director-level ownership of safety performance?

The civil-and-Diya overlay

Outside the criminal frame, the deceased's heirs may pursue civil compensation under the Sharia and commercial-law frame applied by the Court of First Instance. Diya is set by Royal-Decree- and Ministry of Justice circulars at SAR 300,000 standard for accidental death, rising to SAR 400,000 during the Sacred Months and certain qualified circumstances. Diya is a Sharia entitlement payable to the deceased's heirs in addition to (not instead of) the criminal-court determined penalty and the civil compensation. Where insurance coverage is in force, Diya customarily flows from the insurer; where coverage is denied, the personal-balance-sheet and corporate-balance-sheet responsibility falls on the operator and its directors.

The four-track convergence on documentation

The Public Prosecution, the General Directorate of Traffic, the Ministry of Human Resources OSH inspector, and the heirs' civil claim all produce demands for the same body of operational documentation, framed slightly differently:

  1. Was the maintenance file created contemporaneously — at the time of the events, not retrospectively?
  2. Can a court-appointed forensic IT expert authenticate the records as unmodified between the date of the entry and the date of the demand?
  3. Does the documentation cover every link — daily vehicle inspection, defect reporting, repair, post-repair verification, deployment back into service?
  4. Is the supervisory and corporate-governance trail sufficient to defeat the inference of director-level neglect under the Companies Law and the personal liability that flows from breach of duty under the Labour Law and Traffic Law?

The maintenance file that meets these requirements has four properties:

  • Sealed at capture: each entry bears a cryptographic SHA-256 hash generated when the data is first recorded.
  • Chained: each new entry includes the hash of the previous entry, so retrospective alteration becomes detectable to any forensic examiner.
  • Independently verifiable: the Public Prosecution's expert, the GDT examiner, the heirs' expert, the insurer's engineer, the OSH inspector — each can recompute the hashes without relying on the operator's good faith.
  • Bound to identity, location and time: photographs retain EXIF metadata, mechanic identity is verified by one-time passcode at the moment of action, the server timestamp is unalterable.

The corporate-governance dimension under the Companies Law

Royal Decree No. M/132 of 1/12/1443H (2022) — the new Companies Law — sets the framework for director duties and corporate governance. After a fatal incident the Public Prosecution investigates not only the immediate technical cause but the director-level supervisory trail. Quarterly safety reviews, recorded receipt of incident summaries, recorded decisions on flagged exceptions, formal sign-off on OSH risk assessments — these are the documents the prosecutor reads to decide whether a director-level prosecution is supportable in addition to the corporate file.

An operator that produces only invoices, spreadsheets and a handful of paper inspection sheets gives the prosecutor an empty record at exactly the point that decides personal exposure. An operator whose system produces sealed, chained, independently verifiable governance records gives the prosecutor — and the operator's own defence counsel — a complete trail.

Eight steps for a KSA fleet operator before the worst day

  1. Identify each vehicle in your fleet and the specific worksite and operating-route exposure profile in which it operates. A Riyadh 2nd Industrial prime mover deployed to a Sudair worksite is on a higher exposure tier than an inner-Riyadh distribution van.
  2. List the federal authorities whose attention may converge after a serious incident: the Public Prosecution, the General Directorate of Traffic and Saher, the Ministry of Human Resources OSH inspector, the Police Forensic team, the Insurance Authority where insurance refusal proceeds, the Transport General Authority where operator licensing is reviewed, the Ministry of Justice for the civil-compensation track.
  3. Pull your maintenance records for the last twenty-four months. Could a forensic IT expert today certify they were created at the times claimed?
  4. Audit your daily vehicle inspections for the past sixty days. For every defect noted, can you trace receipt, repair, and post-repair verification — each timestamped and unalterable?
  5. Pull your OSH risk assessments under the Labour Law Implementing Regulations. Are they current, properly scoped, and communicated to relevant staff in the appropriate language with documented acknowledgement?
  6. Document your director-level safety oversight. Quarterly safety reviews, recorded receipt of incident summaries, recorded decisions on exceptions — these underpin the Companies Law director-duty defence and reduce the prospect of personal Public Prosecution charges.
  7. Review your contracts with external workshops. Do they provide same-day repair records with photographic evidence and OTP-verified mechanic identity?
  8. Within ninety days, replace paper logs and spreadsheets with a system producing sealed, chained, independently verifiable records. The cost is the system; the cost of not having it is a four-track convergence with no due-diligence defence.

Sources and further reading

Related Mekavo articles: Saher and GDT on Highway 40 — what your driver must produce, Four phrases KSA insurers use under the Cooperative Insurance Law, Persons with Disabilities adapted vehicles under the Authority's framework, Driver defect to verified repair under Labour Law M/51.

Why this matters to us

Mekavo Fleet was built for KSA operators whose worst day produces four concurrent state files — the Public Prosecution criminal investigation, the General Directorate of Traffic technical examination, the Ministry of Human Resources OSH inspection, and the heirs' civil-and-Diya track — each pulling on the same maintenance documentation. Every inspection, every defect report, every repair, every return-to-service verification is sealed at the moment of capture. Cryptographically chained. EXIF-bound. Mechanic identity verified by one-time passcode. Server timestamp not editable, including by us. Anyone — your insurer, the GDT investigator, the Public Prosecutor, the Forensic Medicine examiner, a court-appointed expert, the heirs' counsel — can re-verify the seal independently. We do not give you software. We give you the documentation that supports a Labour Law due-diligence defence, a Companies Law director-duty defence, and a properly anchored response to the heirs' civil claim. Mekavo Fleet for KSA operators.