CAIRO. A collision between two trains with over 30 dead and over one hundred injured occurred in southern Egypt, a country that in the past was the scene of catastrophic railway accidents due to antiquated infrastructures and lack of maintenance. The clash between two passenger convoys took place in the middle of the day in the Tahta area, about 450 km south of Cairo, in the governorate of Sohag, in Upper Egypt. The official toll provided by the Ministry of Health, until late afternoon, was 32 dead and 108 injured. 74 ambulances were sent to the scene. Images of surveillance cameras viewed by the AFP agency showed a convoy thrown into the air in the impact between one traveling at high speed and a second moving slower.
The accident, at least according to the Egyptian National Railways Authority. it was caused by unknown persons who “activated emergency brakes in several cars” causing a rear-end collision of one convoy by another coming at high speed from behind. The dynamic, however, does not reconcile with the direction of the trains, which can be inferred: Egyptian media specify that one went from Sohag to Alexandria and the other to Aswan starting from Cairo. At first, however, the Minister of Transport, Kamel al-Wazir, had asked for the arrest of the drivers of both convoys. Confirming that the focus is still on human error, on Twitter the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi promised “a deterrent punishment for anyone who caused this painful accident through negligence, corruption or something similar”. A punishment to be inflicted “without exception, delay or procrastination”, warned the head of state. Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly ordered to form a specialized technical committee to ascertain the causes of the accident and on the spot, in addition to Wazir and the Minister of Health, Hala Zayed, the Attorney General also brought.
Although the blood toll is heavy, the most serious of the Egyptian train accidents remains that of February 2002 with at least 373 victims caused by the fire of a train overloaded with Islamic pilgrims in al-Ayat, about fifty kilometers south of Cairo. In March last year there were 13 injured in the collision between two trains in Cairo. The central station of the Egyptian capital in February 2019 was the scene of a derailment at full speed resulting in a fire that had caused the death of at least 22 people and the injuries of 41 others. The Minister of Transport, Hisham Arafat, had had to resign and he had been replaced by the current manager, al-Wazir, a general like so many other senior officers placed in key posts by former Chief of Staff Sisi.