TAHTA, Egypt (AP) – Two trains crashed in southern Egypt on Friday, killing at least 32 people and injuring 165, authorities said in a series of fatal crashes in the country’s railway problems.
Apparently, someone activated the emergency brakes on the passenger train and ended up behind another train, causing two wagons to derail and turn next to them, Egyptian railway authorities said, despite that Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly added that no cause has been determined. . The passenger train was heading to the Mediterranean port of Alexandria, north of Cairo, railway officials said.
The video showed piles of twisted metal with dust-covered passengers trapped inside (some bleeding and others unconscious). Passers-by pulled out the dead and left them on the ground nearby.
A passenger was heard shouting in the video, “Help us! People are dying! A passing woman seemed to be upside down, huddled under the seats, shouting, “Get me out, boy!”
Hazem Seliman, who lives near the tracks and heard the crash, said he initially thought the train had hit a car. When he arrived at the scene, he said he found the dead and wounded on the ground, including women and children.
“We took the deceased and put the injured in ambulances,” he said.
More than 100 ambulances were dispatched to the scene in Sohag province, about 440 kilometers south of Cairo, Health Minister Hala Zayed said, and the injured were taken to four hospitals. Injuries included broken bones, cuts and bruises.
Two planes carrying a total of 52 doctors, mostly surgeons, were sent to Sohag, he added at a press conference in the province, accompanied by Madbouly, who added that a military plane would carry those in need of special surgery to the Cairo.
Attorney General Hamada el-Sawy was on site to investigate the accident, he said.
“The (rail) service has been neglected for decades to a point that made it quite obsolete and extremely dangerous,” Madbouly told reporters. “We’ve spent billions on improving the railroad, but we still have a long way to go to complete all the necessary work.”
The government will pay the equivalent of $ 6,400 in compensation to each family that has killed a relative, Madbouly said, while the injured will get between $ 1,280 and $ 2,560, depending on the harm they have suffered.
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said he was monitoring the situation and those responsible would receive “a deterrent punishment.”
“The pain that tears at our hearts today cannot fail to make us more determined to end this kind of disaster,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
Egypt’s rail system has a history of mismanaged and mismanaged equipment, and official data said there were 1,793 train accidents in 2017.
In 2018, a passenger train derailed near the southern city of Aswan, injuring at least six people and causing authorities to fire the country’s railway chief. That same year, el-Sissi said the government needed about 250 billion Egyptian pounds ($ 14.1 billion) to overhaul the rail system. These statements came a day after a passenger train collided with a freight train and killed at least 12 people.
A year earlier, two passenger trains collided on the outskirts of Alexandria and killed 43. In 2016, at least 51 people died when two commuter trains collided near Cairo.
Egypt’s deadliest train crash was in 2002, when more than 300 people died after a fire broke out on a train traveling from Cairo to southern Egypt.