At least three killed as trains collide in Egypt

At least three people have been killed and 49 injured in a train collision in Egypt, the country’s health ministry said Saturday.

Thirty ambulances and reinforcement medical teams were sent to the scene of the collision in the city of Zagazig, the capital of Al Sharkia governorate, the ministry said in a statement.

The injured people were transferred to Al-Ahrar and Zagazig University hospitals in the city, and “rescue operations are still ongoing,” the ministry added.

It said at least five of those injured were in “unstable” conditions.

Images from the scene showed crowds of people gathered around the twisted wreckage of the trains as the rescue operations took place.

There has been a deadly accident on Egypt’s aging railway system almost every year for the past 20 years. Egypt recorded 2,044 train accidents in 2018 and 1,793 the year before, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS).

In 2021, at least 32 people were killed and 165 injured when two trains collided. In 2019, at least 25 people were killed and dozens injured in a fire at Ramses station in central Cairo, the country’s busiest, after a train collided with the platform, causing its fuel tank to explode.

A collision between two trains in Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, in August 2017 left more than 40 dead and many more injured.

In 2012, 44 children died after a train crashed into a school bus in Egypt’s Asyut governorate.

But the most lethal accident in Egyptian rail history occurred in 2002, when a fire on a passenger train traveling south from Cairo to Luxor killed more than 360 people.