At least 25 people were killed and 55 others injured when a passenger train drove full-speed into the back of another on Saturday in Giza, southwest of the Egyptian capital, witnesses and police said.
The toll, however, “may become worse,” a police official at the scene said.
A security services official who declined to give his name said that the trains “were traveling on the same track. One ran into the other as they headed towards Upper Egypt.”
The trains collided near the village of Guerzah, around 40km from Cairo, when one train stopped unexpectedly and another, also heading south from the capital, ploughed into it from behind, the security official said.
The first train, heading to Fayyum, 100km south of Cairo made an unscheduled halt, apparently after hitting a cow.
However the second train, on a southbound journey from Cairo towards Assiyut, 400km from the capital, traveled onwards at normal speed until it slammed into the back of the stationary train, the official said.
Villager Samhi Saleh Abdel Al, 21, said that “the first train stopped after hitting a cow and 10 minutes later the second train arrived at full speed.”
“I sat near the road at around six o’clock when I heard a deafening screeching, then shouts and I saw passengers jumping from the train,” he said.
Dozens of ambulances rushed to the scene, with rescue workers trying to use a crane to lift one wagon from on top of the other in the hope of finding bodies in the wreckage.
Al-Ayyat was the scene of Egypt’s deadliest ever train crash when the bodies of at least 361 passengers were recovered from a train following a fire in February 2002.
Egypt’s national railway system is the biggest in the Middle East, with nearly 5,000km of track, according to Egyptian National Railways, which employs 86,000 people.
There have been other fatal crashes on the busy rail network.
In July last year, at least 44 people died near Marsa Matruh in northwest Egypt when a runaway truck hurtled into bus, truck and several cars waiting at a level crossing, shunting the vehicles into the path of a train.
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