At least 32 dead as two trains collide in Egypt

At least 32 people have been killed and 108 others injured after two passenger trains collided in southern Egypt.

The train crash north of the city of Sohag caused three carriages to flip over, health authorities said.

Local media displayed videos from the scene around 230 miles south of Cairo showing flipped wagons with passengers trapped inside and surrounded by rubble.

Some victims seemed unconscious, while others could be seen bleeding. Bystanders carried bodies, laying them out on the ground near the site of the crash.

Others desperately searched through the carriages for survivors.

Egypt's railway authority said on Friday that two trains collided close to the Nile-side town of Tahta after emergency brakes were triggered by “unknown individuals”.

The brakes caused one of the trains to stop and the other to crash into it from behind, and the authority is conducting further investigations, it said.

“The trains collided while going at not very high speeds, which led to the destruction of two carriages and a third to overturn,” a security source told Reuters.

Casualties were being taken to hospitals and 36 ambulances were dispatched to the scene, the health ministry said.

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi mourned the victims of the crash in a statement posted on his official social media and said those responsible would be punished.

El-Sisi also told Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to head to the site of the crash with the ministers of health and social solidarity, state television reported.

Egypt’s railway system has a history of badly maintained equipment and poor management. Official figures show that 1,793 train accidents took place in 2017 across the country.

In 2018, a passenger train derailed near the southern city of Aswan, injuring at least six people and prompting authorities to fire the chief of the country's railways.

In the same year, El-Sissi said the government lacks about 250 billion Egyptian pounds, or $14.1 billion, to overhaul the run-down rail system.

He spoke a day after a passenger train collided with a cargo train, killing at least 12 people, including a child.

A year earlier, two passenger trains collided just outside the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, killing 43 people. In 2016, at least 51 people were killed when two commuter trains collided near Cairo.

Egypt’s deadliest train crash took place in 2002, when over 300 people were killed when fire erupted in speeding train traveling from Cairo to southern Egypt.