Eighteen people were killed and two others were wounded late on Wednesday when a microbus and a lorry collided on Sharm el-Sheikh-Abu Rudeis road in Sinai, Egypt’s Ambulance Service said in a statement on Thursday.
Among the dead are 12 conscripts from the Dahab police department, while the six other victims included four students.
Egypt has one of the world’s highest traffic-accident mortality rates, with traffic accidents themselves apparently on the rise.
In December, the government’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) said there were 6,916 accidents during the first half of 2015, compared with 6,685 accidents during the same period in 2014, an increase of 3.5 percent.
The high mortality rate is to some extent due to the large distances between ambulance stations in some areas, thus slowing paramedic response times.
However, the number of deaths has decreased recently, with 2,808 deaths in the first half of 2015, a decline of 2.7 percent on the previous year.
Edited translation from MENA
