Workers of Beheira train collision referred to trial

CAIRO – 23 May 2018: Egypt’s Attorney General Nabil Sadek referred to trial on Wednesday the defendants in a collision accident between two trains in Beheira, where seven people were killed and 49 others injured, in February.

Investigations revealed that the tragedy was caused by human error, as well as giving orders to switch the route of one of the trains before making sure that all its carriages passed the switch point.

Egypt as a whole has a history of train accidents over the past 15 years. Egypt Today provides details of five major train crashes in Egypt:

February 2002: 300 people died while travelling from Cairo to Aswan in the south. This accident was caused by a fire that swept through an overcrowded train. It is considered the worst disaster to hit the country's railway system in the past 25 years. The transportation minister at the time was forced to resign as a result.

August 2006: At least 58 people were killed and 143 injured when two passenger trains heading to Cairo from the Nile Delta towns of Mansoura and Benha collided.

October 2009: Two trains collided in the el-Ayat area, leaving 30 killed and many others injured. The first train had broken down and was rear-ended by the second. Transport Minister Mohammed Lutfi Mansour resigned three days after the accident.

November 2012: A school bus was hit by a train in central Egypt, and 50 children, aged four to six years old, and the driver of the bus were killed. This accident happened near Manfalut, 350km (230 miles) south of Cairo. The transport minister resigned in the wake of the accident.

January 2013: A military train derailed, killing 19 and injuring more than 100. The train, which was heading to Cairo from Asyut and carried new recruits of the Egyptian Central Security Forces, derailed in the Egyptian city of Badrashin.

According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) in 2016, Egypt has witnessed an average of 1,041 train accidents on an annual basis in the last 12 years.

A total of 13,539 train accidents occurred between 2004 and 2016, reports CAPMAS, citing numbers released by the National Railway Authority of Egypt.