At least 10 people are dead after a train ploughed through a minibus while it crossed railway tracks in Egypt.
One child is in critical condition, while 10 more people are injured, as a result of the crash along the Qantara East-Bir al-Abd line, near the Suez Canal, on Thursday.
Pictures from the scene show the crumpled and tangled metal remains of a red minibus beside a railway track running through Ismailia province, east of Cairo.
The minibus, understood to have mounted the tracks at an unofficial crossing, was carrying children home from nursery at the time, local media reports.
All the injured were taken to East Qantara central hospital, in Ismailia province, Egypt’s railway authority said. One child is in critical condition.
Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly has ordered payments to £1,520 to each of the victims’ families.
The national railway authority warned drivers to avoid crossing tracks in unauthorised areas.
Crashes and derailments are a major problem in Egypt, which saw 181 separate incidents in 2023.
Two people were killed when a train struck a truck crossing tracks in the Mediterranean province of Alexandria last August.
In October, one person died when two trains crashed in the country’s south.
The previous month, three people died when two passenger trains collided in Zagazig, a city in the Nile Delta.
Dozens of people injured in those collisions, but they were small incidents compared to the Sohag crash of 2021, in which 32 people died and more than 100 were injured.
Two trains collided after someone activated emergency brakes and three passengers carriages flipped over, trapping passengers inside.
Often, aging infrastructure, corruption and mismanagement are blamed.
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi estimated, in 2018, that it would cost £6.3billion to properly overhaul the neglected network.
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