Seven killed, over 100 injured in train collision south of Cairo

Cairo:  Seven people were killed and over 100 others injured when two trains collided Sunday south of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, the Chief Prosecutor’s office said in a statement. It also said the train’s conductor was among those killed.

The crash occurred in al-Ayyat district in Giza province, about 52 kilometres south of Cairo, when a train travelling to the southwestern Fayoum province crashed into the rear of a train heading to the southern province of Aswan, according to the Transportation Ministry.

The Chief Prosecutor’s office said late Sunday its investigators had arrived at the site. An inspection indicated that the crash took place when the Giza-Fayyoum train collided with the last carriage of the Cairo-Aswan train, that was stationary on the same track and travelling in the same direction, officials said.

Train derailments and crashes are common in Egypt, where the railway system which has a history of mismanagement and poor maintenance of equipment. In recent years, the government announced modernisation initiatives to improve its railways.

Ayman Gamal, a resident of Kafr Girza in al-Ayyat where the crash occurred, said people living nearby rushed to the scene, pulled out survivors and called ambulances,

Gamal said that he saw around 80 of the injured were taken by ambulances to nearby hospitals. Some passengers were trapped inside one of the carriages of the stationary train and were dead when they were pulled out, he said.

President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said in a social media post that he ordered a prompt investigation into the crash.

Emergency teams and cranes were dispatched to the scene to clear the wreckage and restore train services to their normal schedule as soon as possible, the Egyptian Railway Authority said.

Last September, a train driver and his assistant were injured after two freight trains collided in the same district.

Egypt’s deadliest train crash was in 2002, when more than 300 people were killed after a fire broke out on an overnight train journeying from Cairo to southern Egypt.