A 22-year-old student was caught speeding at 89mph in a 30mph zone had claimed he was going so fast because his metric speedometer confused him.<\/p>\n
Khalid Al-Qahtani was seen driving down Ling Road,\u00a0Loughborough, at nearly 60mph over the speed limit early part of last year.<\/p>\n
Al-Qahtani pleaded guilty to the speeding offence in a court appearance, in 2017 and on February 14 he appeared at Leicester Magistrates’ Court for sentencing.<\/p>\n
Al-Qahtani, said: \u201cIt was my car which was by kilometres not by miles, that is why I was confused by what the speed was.\u201d<\/p>\n
His car had been shipped over to England from Qatar, and had a speedometer which measured speed in kilometres per hour rather than miles per hour.<\/p>\n
When Al-Qahtani was asked how fast he had been travelling in kilometres, he said: \u201cI don\u2019t know how much it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 89mph he clocked equates to approximately 143kmph.<\/p>\n
If he had been travelling at 30mph, the speedometer would have shown about 48kmph.<\/p>\n
When asked during his hearing whether a ban would cause him any hardship, he told magistrates he was no longer driving<\/p>\n
Al-Qahtani, whose first language is not English, said: \u201cI\u2019ve already cancelled to drive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Addressing Al-Qahtani, the chairman of the bench: \u201cThat could have killed anybody on the road.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou will have been going very fast.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t drive like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The magistrates decided to impose an outright driving ban on Al-Qahtani, rather than adding points to his licence.<\/p>\n
The chairman told the defendant: \u201cWe are going to disqualify you from driving with immediate effect for six months.\u201d<\/p>\n
When a fine and costs were being discussed, Al-Qahtani told the magistrates that his income was \u00a31,000 per month.<\/p>\n
Magistrates fined Al-Qahtani \u00a3110 and ordered him to pay costs of \u00a385.<\/p>\n
He was also charged a \u00a330 victim surcharge.<\/p>\n
After the case, Graham Compton, road safety officer for\u00a0Leicestershire Police, said the force welcomed the sentence.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cAnyone travelling at that sort of speed in a 30mph area is obviously putting other road users at great risk of injury.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would support any sentence that has been given in this case.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are trying very hard as a road safety partnership to get people to follow the signposted speed limits.\u201d<\/p>\n
The minimum penalty for speeding is a \u00a3100 fine and three driving licence penalty points.<\/p>\n
Building up more than 12 points within three years can lead to a disqualification.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A 22-year-old student was caught speeding at 89mph in a 30mph zone had claimed he was going so fast because his metric speedometer confused him. Khalid Al-Qahtani was seen driving down Ling Road,\u00a0Loughborough, at nearly 60mph over the speed limit early part of last year. Al-Qahtani pleaded guilty to the speeding offence in a court […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,239,3,112],"tags":[806,807],"class_list":["post-25702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-motoring","category-news","category-top-stories","tag-khalid-al-qahtani","tag-speeding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}