DUBAI — A speeding car struck and killed 21-year-old Indian architecture student Naifa Balkies Hameed on Al Khawaneej Street as she stood behind her vehicle waiting for roadside assistance, Dubai Police confirmed.
She died on the spot.
Hameed, a final-year undergraduate at Canadian University Dubai, was driving along the Al Khawaneej corridor on her way to morning lectures when a tyre went flat. She pulled her car to the side of the road. Stranded and anxious about missing class, she dialled her father, Binu Hameed, who was in Kerala attending an extended family wedding. He told her to stay calm, contact a roadside breakdown service, dispatch the vehicle to a repair garage, and hail a taxi straight to campus.
She never made it.
Five minutes later, her father called back to check if the recovery truck had arrived. The phone rang out unanswered. Within an hour, Dubai Police contacted the family with the devastating confirmation: a vehicle travelling at high speed had barrelled into the rear of her stranded car, running her over as she waited on the roadside.
Patrolling units and emergency medical personnel reached the crash site immediately, but paramedics could not revive her due to catastrophic trauma. Officers arrested the driver of the speeding vehicle at the scene. Traffic investigators launched an active probe into the vehicle's telemetry and speed before the impact.
Shock swept through the expat community and Hameed's hometown of Thodupuzha in central Kerala. Her father, a businessman with long-standing commercial ties across Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and India, had permanently relocated the household to the emirate to support her higher education.
Yet her life was cut short just months before graduation. A licensed motorist since age 18, she regularly drove several family vehicles. On the morning of the collision, she took her brother's sedan—which had sat parked for days while he remained in India for post-wedding gatherings. Hameed and her mother, Seema, had returned to Dubai early precisely to ensure she did not fall behind on university coursework.
Family members described the final-year student as an anchor across generations, known for tracking every relative's birthday and mailing handwritten cards across time zones.
Traffic prosecutors have placed the arrested driver under custodial interrogation while Dubai authorities finalize forensic reports and administrative clearances to repatriate her remains to Kerala.