Past Perfect (Progressive) problem

Question

I was helping my nephew with some homework but this time I reached my limit. I am not quite sure what the correct answer is here or even if there is only one good answer. One has to finish the sentence:

The police asked him, "Did you see who caused the accident?"
They asked him if he had seen who...

The sentence should finish in Simple Past Perfect, I assume.
I would say:

... has caused the accident.

I spent one year in the USA and my English skills were never a problem for me, but my grammar is a bit rusty. From what I have read online I think we should exchange the "has" for "had".

Nicholas · Accepted Answer

It should either be simple past, ie. who caused the accident, or past perfect, which is who had caused the accident.
To quote English Page:

The past perfect is a verb tense which is used to show that an action took place once or many times before another point in the past.

In this case, it is clear that the seeing of the accident took place before the police's asking the man. Since the police "asked" the man(in the past), and the accident happened before that, the criterion for using the past perfect is met.
Source: https://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/pastperfect.html

Past Perfect (Progressive) problem

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