Train collision in northern Egypt kills 43, injures scores

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — Two passenger trains collided Friday just outside Egypt’s Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, killing 43 people in the country’s deadliest rail accident in more than a decade, authorities said.

Magdy Hegazy, a top health official in Alexandria, said that along with the 43 killed, the crash also injured 122 people.

The Egyptian Railways Authority said earlier that a train from Cairo, Egypt’s capital, crashed into the back of a train that was waiting at a small station in the district of Khorshid, just east of Alexandria.

The stationary train had just arrived from Port Said, a Mediterranean city on the northern tip of the Suez Canal, when it was hit, according to the statement.

The statement did not say what caused the accident, only that the authority’s experts would investigate.

Associated Press footage from the scene showed mangled train coaches on the tracks and several others derailed as hundreds of onlookers and victims’ relatives gathered on both sides of the tracks.

Ambulances were standing by and riot police and soldiers were deployed to keep the onlookers away from the scene. Residents from nearby homes rushed to the scene to look for survivors inside crushed train carriages or offer first aid to the injured.

An eyewitness who lives close to the crash site said he and others went to the site when they heard the sound of the impact.

“We ran to the scene and we found people jumping from the train and lots of dead,” said Abdel-Bari Abdel-Hamid.

By nightfall, cranes aided by floodlights began to remove the wreckage off the tracks to allow rail traffic to resume. Rescue teams, meanwhile, continued to look for survivors and more bodies.