Two trains collided on Sunday south of the Egyptian capital Cairo, killing seven people and injuring at least 125, authorities said. The train’s conductor was among those killed.

The Health Ministry gave the casualty toll, saying in a statement that over 70 of the injured were discharged after receiving treatment.

The crash happened in al-Ayyat district in Giza province, about 52 kilometres south of Cairo, when a train travelling to southwestern Fayoum province crashed into the rear of a train heading to the southern province of Aswan, according to the Transportation Ministry.

The Chief Prosecutor's office said late on Sunday that its investigators had arrived at the site. An inspection indicated that the crash took place when the Giza-Fayyoum train collided with the last car of the Cairo-Aswan train, which was stationary on the same track and travelling in the same direction, officials said.

Train derailments and crashes are common in Egypt, where the railway system has a history of mismanagement and poor maintenance of equipment. In recent years, the government has announced modernisation initiatives.

Ayman Gamal, a resident of Kafr Girza in al-Ayyat where the crash happened, said people living nearby rushed to the scene, pulled out survivors and called ambulances.

Gamal said that he saw around 80 of the injured being taken by ambulances to nearby hospitals. Some passengers were trapped inside one of the cars of the stationary train and were dead when they were pulled out, he said.

Outside al-Wasta Central Hospital in Beni Suef province, where some of the injured were taken for treatment, survivors said passengers were in shock and struggling to breathe because of all the dust that was kicked up. Nearby villagers eventually got them out, they said.

Farha Gamal, a survivor who was inside the Fayyoum train, said she saw some of the passengers who appeared dead and others were struggling to find their way out of the car.

“There were other cars that were completely mangled," she said in an interview.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he was following the accident "with great concern", and had directed authorities to conduct an urgent investigation to "hold accountable anyone found to have been negligent".

Emergency teams and cranes were dispatched to the scene to clear the wreckage and restore train services to their normal schedule as soon as possible, the Egyptian Railway Authority said.

Last September, a train driver and his assistant were injured after two freight trains collided in the same district.

Egypt’s deadliest train crash was in 2002, when more than 300 people were killed after a fire broke out on an overnight train journeying from Cairo to southern Egypt. (AP/AFP)



Edited by Cecil Wong