Saudi female who defied driving ban on women in fatal accident Read

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Saudi police say that an unnamed Saudi woman who defied the driving ban in Saudi Arabia was seriously injured and her companion killed in a road accident in the northern Hael province on Saturday.
AFP reports that according to police spokesman Abdulaziz al-Zunaidi, "One woman was immediately killed and her companion who was driving the car was hospitalized after she suffered several injuries when their four-wheel-drive vehicle overturned late on Saturday."
According to AFP, there have recently been in Saudi Arabia, a number of incidents involving women defying the driving ban killed in accidents. In November 2010, another Saudi woman who defied the driving ban was killed along with three of her 10 female passengers when the car overturned in a crash.
Saudi Arabia: Defying the ban on women driving
Manal al-Sharif came to international attention and become a icon of the of campaign against the ban on women driving in Saudi when she posted on YouTube, a video of herself driving a car around the eastern city of Khobar. The 32-year-old computer security consultant was arrested on May 22 and detained for 10 days.
Her action emboldened other women to defy the ban and to film themselves defying it. Many women have been arrested driving. According to AFP, five Saudi women were arrested driving in late June in Jeddah.
The Telegraph reports that al-Sharif and a group of women activists started a Facebook page called "Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself," on which they urged the authorities to lift the ban.
Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries in the world where women are not allowed to drive cars, but women sometimes take advantage of remoteness from the capital where the law is most zealously enforced to drive. In major cities, women who can afford it hire drivers while those who cannot rely on male relatives to drive them.
The Independent reports that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia declared last year that women would receive the right to vote and run in national elections in 2015. But only two days after the announcement, in what seemed a retrogressive step, a woman was sentenced to 10 lashes for driving in public, but the sentence was overturned after public pressure mounted.