Two days ago on this blog we noted the death of Theyab Awana, a UAE soccer player killed in a car crash here in Abu Dhabi. He was best known for scoring a backheel penalty shot in a game versus Lebanon.

One of our news reporters tracked down the 21-year-old player’s father, and in this story the father makes clear that he “believes his son  … was sending messages on his Blackberry” when he drove into a truck parked on the side of the highway.

This will add urgency to a discussion begun here with Theyab Awana’s death.

To wit:

The carnage on the UAE’s highways.

Even with a 14 percent drop in fatalities from 2009, when 966 people died in traffic accidents, the toll of 826 people killed on the roads in 2010 is still far above where the government wants it to be.

As this story in The National noted, the rate is still a bit over 10 fatalities per 100,000 people living in the UAE, and the goal is 1.5 per 100,000.

Progress has been made, when we consider this chart of fatalities per 100,000 based on statistics compiled in the year 2000. Back then,  the UAE rate was 37 fatalities per 100,000, compared to 12.3 for the U.S. and 3.6 for the UK.

The UAE figures are a little misleading, however, because this is a country in which a huge fraction of the people — I’m just going to throw out a number here, 50 percent — don’t drive. At all. Ever.

The non-drivers would include nearly all of that huge chunk of people known here as “laborers,” many of whom are dirt poor and get from their living quarters to their job sites via bus. Many more of the expats here have jobs in the service industry that provide them with more income than the laborers receive, but not enough to buy or lease a car.

Thus, an outsized fraction of the people who drive here come from the country’s 1 million Emiratis and the perhaps 50,000 Western expats. So, figure the UAE’s rate of fatalities per driver is more like 20 per 100,000 from among the people who actually drive — twice what the actual number suggests.

Anecdotally, an astonishing number of Emiratis have told me that one of their relatives or friends was killed while driving.

Having done some driving here, I can attest that the roads here are dangerous. It’s great that most of the major highways are often wide open, but that tempts drivers, many of whom drive high-performance vehicles, into high speeds.

(Legal limit on freeways: 140kph, or 87mph. A year ago the legal limit was 160kph, or 99.4mph.)

The number of drivers attempting to multi-task while behind the wheel, and the fraction who might fall asleep, is further pushed up by the dreary desert scenery on most of the major highways, the heat outside and the near-constant glare.

The Al Ain goalkeeper I did a story on last year fell asleep at the wheel on an empty desert highway and nearly died.

Theyab Awana apparently was texting. His father said he based that belief on the lack of skid marks before the Audi Q7 that Theyab was driving struck the stationary vehicle, and the lack of brake lights seen by a friend who was driving a following car.

At the player’s funeral, on Monday, detailed in this story, the minister of the interior (who also runs the Baniyas soccer club for which Theyab Awana played) made a plea for safer driving, saying the country was losing too many of its  “energetic sons in avoidable accidents.”

If the debate on traffic safety becomes more prominent, and some people here give up texting while driving, then perhaps the death of Theyab Awana will not have been just a numbing waste.