At least seven people have been killed and 112 injured after two passenger trains collided in Egypt's Giza governorate on Sunday, the country's Health Ministry said, in the latest deadly accident on a railway network with a long record of fatal crashes.
The collision happened in the Al-Ayyat district, about 76 kilometres south of the capital, Cairo, between Kafr Ammar and Al-Raqqa stations. Several carriages left the tracks in the impact, and emergency crews worked through the evening to free trapped passengers and clear the wreckage.
According to the Egyptian National Railways Authority, train No. 134, a Tahya Misr service travelling from Giza towards Fayoum, struck the rear of train No. 2010, which was travelling from Cairo towards the southern city of Aswan. The second train was on the same track ahead of it when the collision occurred.
The Health Ministry said the seven dead and 112 injured were the latest confirmed figures after rescue work continued through the day. An earlier count had put the toll at four dead and 88 injured, and officials warned that the figures could still change as hospitals completed their assessments.
Of the injured, 45 people had been discharged from nearby hospitals after their condition improved, the ministry said, while others remained under treatment. Health Minister Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar ordered hospitals in Giza and the neighbouring Beni Suef governorate to raise their state of readiness, and 72 ambulances took part in the evacuation, taking the injured to hospitals in Al-Wasta, El-Ayyat and Atfih.
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said he was following the accident closely and ordered a swift investigation, adding that anyone found negligent should be held accountable. Egypt's public prosecutor's office said investigations were under way to determine the technical reasons behind the crash, including the signalling and scheduling decisions that placed the two trains on the same stretch of track.
The railway authority said emergency crews were clearing the wreckage to restore services on the Cairo to Upper Egypt line, but gave no indication of how long the work would take. Train services between Giza and the Upper Egypt region were suspended while cranes were brought in to remove the damaged carriages.
The cause of the collision had not been officially established by Sunday evening. Officials did not say whether a signalling failure, a scheduling error or another factor was responsible, and the prosecutor's findings are expected to be published once the technical investigation is complete.
Al-Ayyat carries painful memories for Egyptians. It was the site of the country's worst-ever rail disaster in February 2002, when a fire swept through a train travelling from Cairo to Luxor and killed more than 360 people. Sunday's crash happened in the same district, a fact that has added to the public anger over railway safety.
Egypt's railway system is the oldest in Africa and the Middle East, and it has a long history of deadly accidents. Successive governments have promised modernisation, new signalling systems and tighter safety rules after each disaster, yet collisions and derailments have continued to claim lives, often on the busy lines linking Cairo with the south of the country.
Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered its condolences to the families of the victims on Sunday, in one of the first international reactions to the crash. Messages of sympathy also came from across the region as the scale of the casualties became clear.
For the families of the dead and injured, the investigation's outcome will matter as much as the rescue effort. If the inquiry finds that the crash could have been prevented, it will renew pressure on the authorities to speed up the long-promised overhaul of the railway — and to explain why, more than two decades after the Al-Ayyat fire, the same stretch of line has claimed lives again.
