Railway movement between Cairo and Upper Egypt resumed on Thursday following a halt caused by a train crash in Beni Suef.
The train, a trailer dragging two other wagons coming from Aswan on its way to Cairo, derailed at a stop near Beni Suef’s city of Nasser, hitting a reinforced concrete block next to the rails.
The Health Ministry said seventy people were wounded in the accident, 58 of whom have left the hospital.
The train’s engineer and two level crossing watchmen are in police custody preparing for investigations.
Initial investigations by prosecutors revealed that some passengers jumped off the train into a ditch and into farmland along the railway at the time of the crash. The train’s high speed caused it to ram into a railway storage strip before hitting a concrete block, causing all wagons to turn over.
There were 640 train accidents in the first half of 2015 that killed 42 people. Both statistics mark an increase compared to 2014, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics said in its report last December on car and train accidents.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
