Fifty-one people were killed on Monday when two trains travelling on the same track collided in northern Egypt in the country’s deadliest rail crash in four years.
Two carriages were derailed in a tangle of torn metal as one train slammed into the back of another. Another 138 passengers — mostly farmers or government workers commuting to Cairo — were injured in the crash which also set one train ablaze.
”The number of casualties has been established at 51 dead and 138 injured,” said Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali, quoted by the government news agency Mena.
Earlier, a security source told Agence France-Presse at the scene that rescue workers had extricated at least 43 bodies from the twisted remains of the two carriages as cranes were brought in to help lift the wreckage.
Hundreds of onlookers and would-be rescuers crowded at the crash site at Qaliub, 20km north of the capital.
The security source said one train had been heading for Cairo from Mansura 130km north of the capital while the other, on the same line, was coming from Benha, 50km north.
Preliminary findings of a police investigation into the cause of the crash suggested that the train coming from Mansura ignored a light and rammed the back of the other train.
Ambulances rushed the injured to Cairo and other hospitals in this southern region of the Nile delta. Policeman Mamduh Amer said most of the victims were farmers or government employees.
Egypt has a history of train crashes. Its deadliest rail disaster occurred on February 20 2002, when a passenger using a stove set ablaze a train heading to the south,
killing at least 361.
Since last February there have been three major train crash in Egypt.
In May, 45 people were injured when a cargo train slammed into a stationary passenger train near the Nile Delta village of Alshat in the northern Egyptian governate of al-Sharqiya.
Three months earlier, 20 people were injured when two trains travelling in the same direction collided near the Mediterranean city of Alexandria. The second, faster train, ran into the back of the first when the driver failed to see it because of poor visibility.
Most of the crashes have been subsequently blamed on negligence and poor maintenance.
Forty-one people were killed in a crash near Alexandria in 1998, 30 died in another accident between the southern cities of Luxor and Aswan in 1997, and 75 perished in another disaster south of Cairo in 1995. – Sapa-AFP