The head of Egypt’s national railway authority has been sacked following a train crash in northern Egypt that left 58 people dead, security sources told Agence France-Presse on Tuesday.
Transport Minister Mohamed Mansur announced late on Monday that Hanafy Abdel Qawi had been fired and his deputy Eid Mahran suspended pending an investigation into Monday’s crash.
Mansur also said a technical committee will be formed to ”study the causes of the crash and to prevent such accidents in the future”, the official Mena agency reported.
At least 58 people were killed and 144 injured when a passenger train slammed into another train on the same track in Qaliub, just north of Cairo, derailing carriages in tangled heaps of metal and setting one train ablaze.
It was Egypt’s worst rail crash in more than four years. In February 2002 a passenger using a stove set ablaze a train heading to the south, killing at least 361 people. — Sapa-AFP