Image source, Getty Images
- Author, Ahmed Yahya
- Role, BBC – Cairo
A collision occurred between two passenger trains in the city of Zagazig, north of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, on Saturday evening, resulting in the death of three people and the injury of 49 others, according to a statement by the Egyptian Ministry of Health.
Egyptian media raised the number of injured to 60.
The Egyptian Railway Authority said in a statement that the collision occurred between a passenger train heading from Zagazig to Ismailia, while the other was on its way to Zagazig coming from Mansoura, where the collision occurred in the city of Zagazig.
The Ministry of Health sent about 39 ambulances to the accident site, while rescue operations continue. The Ministry of Transport formed a committee of railway specialists to determine the causes of the accident.
The most prominent train accidents in Egypt in recent years:
2013: Two accidents occurred in the same area, Badrashin. In January, the last car of a train carrying Central Security Forces recruits derailed, killing 17 recruits and injuring more than 100 others. Then in November, a train collided with two vehicles (a bus and a car), leaving 27 dead and 34 injured.
March 2015: A school bus collided with a freight train in Gharbia Governorate, after the bus driver crossed an illegal crossing barrier set up by the owner of a nearby farm. The accident resulted in the death of seven children and the injury of 25 others.
February 2016: Two carriages of a passenger train, coming from Aswan in the south of the country to Cairo, overturned after they derailed, and the accident resulted in the injury of 72 people.
August 2017: Two passenger trains collided in Alexandria, with one coming from Cairo hitting a carriage of another train heading from Alexandria to Port Said. The accident resulted in the death of 41 passengers and the injury of more than 120.
February 2018: Two trains collided in Beheira Governorate, in northern Egypt, when two carriages of a passenger train derailed and collided with a freight train passing through the same station. The accident resulted in the death of 12 passengers.
February 2019: Two collision accidents occurred, the first was a train colliding with a concrete barrier at Ramses Station in Cairo, which resulted in the death of 28 people and the injury of 52 others. The second was a train colliding with a transport vehicle on the (Matrouh-Alexandria) railway line, which resulted in the death of one person and the injury of 6 others.
March 2021: A passenger train collided with another train from behind, in the Tahta Center district of Sohag Governorate, which resulted in three carriages derailing, killing more than 30 people and injuring dozens.
April 2021: The Egyptian Ministry of Health announced the death of 11 people and the injury of 98 others, in a train derailment accident near the city of Toukh in Qalyubia Governorate.
The special train number 949, heading from Cairo to Mansoura, derailed on April 18.
Eyewitnesses reported that a senior judicial official was among the train victims. The witnesses said that the deputy head of the State Lawsuits Authority, who was on board one of the overturned train cars, died in a hospital near the accident site.
September 2022: A train accident occurred in Faqus city in Sharqia governorate, as a result of the train colliding with a small passenger bus (microbus) in the village of “Akyad”. The Undersecretary of the Ministry of Health in Sharqia explained that the accident resulted in three deaths and 11 injuries.
March 2023: The Egyptian Ministry of Health reported that two people were killed and about 20 injured, some of them seriously, after a passenger train derailed in the city of Qalyub, north of Cairo.
Local media and eyewitnesses reported that the train derailed after leaving Qalyub station, about 10 kilometers from Cairo, heading to the city of Menoufia in the middle of the Delta.
Videos circulating on social media showed that the train collided with a stopped train, causing it to derail.
But the most deadly accident in the history of the Egyptian railways occurred in 2002, when a fire on a passenger train traveling from Cairo to Luxor in the south killed more than 360 people, in what was known in the media as the “Upper Egypt Train” accident.
“Shocking numbers”
An official Egyptian statistic issued in 2017 stated that the number of train accidents reached 12,236 accidents between 2006 and 2016. The statistic, which was prepared by the Railway Authority in cooperation with the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, stated that the largest number of accidents occurred in 2009, reaching 1,577 accidents, while 2012 witnessed the smallest number of accidents, 447 accidents, as a result of the repeated interruption of service after the events of the revolution.
According to the official figures available.
- 2013 witnessed: 781 accidents.
The relative decrease in the number of accidents in 2020 is due to the general lockdown imposed by the coronavirus pandemic on train travel, as well as the government’s resort to implementing periods of curfew, with the aim of combating the pandemic and preventing the spread of infection among passengers on trains.
According to reports from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, the average rate of train accidents relative to the population is 0.1 percent (accident) per 1,000 people in Egypt.