A head-on collision between two passenger trains on Monday injured 95 people in the south of the Tunisian capital, emergency services said.
“The injured were taken to hospitals and there were no deaths,” civil defense spokesman Moez Triaa said, adding that only one of the trains was carrying passengers.
Most of the injured sustained bruises or fractures, none of them life-threatening, he said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Many passengers were in shock, he said, adding that about 15 ambulances were dispatched to treat the wounded or take them to hospitals.
The collision occurred at 9:30am in the Jbel Jelloud area, on the approach to a terminus in central Tunis.
The Tunisian National Railway Co said that 84 people were wounded and “77 were able to leave hospital, while seven others are under observation.”
Tunisian Minister of Transport Rabi al-Majidi visited the site of the accident, but did not speak to the media.
The cause of the accident was not immediately clear, but the railway company said that an investigation has been opened.
Hours after the accident, the Tunisian National Office for Civil Protection said that five people had been wounded when another train carrying 220 people was derailed on the way toward the Kef region, west of Tunis.
Tunisia’s aging railway system has seen several deadly crashes in the past few years.
From 2017 to last year, there were 173 train accidents that killed 229 people and injured 345, said Achraf Yehyaoui, spokesman for a governmental agency for preventing transport accidents.
At least five people were killed and more than 50 injured in late 2016 when a train slammed into a public bus near the site of Monday’s crash.
An official said that signals and safety gates were out of service at the time of the crash.
The 2016 accident prompted the sacking of railway company chief Sabiha Derbal.
The previous year, Tunisia experienced one of its worst railway disasters, when 18 people were killed after a train hit a truck and derailed at a railway crossing south of the capital because of a signals failure.
The country also has a poor road safety record, with about 980 deaths and more than 6,500 injuries last year, Tunisian Ministry of the Interior data showed.
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