A collision between a tourist bus and a truck that occurred this Wednesday morning in the Egyptian province of Aswan, in the extreme south of the country, has left at least 10 fatalities, including five Egyptians, four French travelers and one Belgian. , as reported by the authorities in a statement. Another 14 people, of whom eight are tourists from France and six from Belgium, have been injured in the same crash, the cause of which has not been immediately clarified.
Images of the accident spread on social networks and in local media show the tourist bus, which apparently received the impact in its front part, off the road, engulfed by the flames and giving off a dense black smoke. The clash took place about 40 kilometers south of Aswan, in the direction of the historic pharaonic temples of Abu Simbel, one of the main tourist attractions in Egypt.
The clash in Aswan came just five days after three more people, in this case two Polish tourists and an Egyptian driver, were killed when a bus crashed on a Red Sea road, another of Egypt’s busiest tourist areas. The last friday. That incident left 14 Poles and two more Egyptians injured. The bus was carrying 21 people.
Although the number of road accidents in Egypt has decreased in recent years, in part due to an ambitious plan by the authorities to develop and improve the national road network, the country had at least until recently one of the highest rates of road accidents in the world. Car accidents still today leave thousands of deaths a year.
The exact figure on the number of accidents in Egypt is difficult to know because they are not counted centrally and various state agencies offer different data. Still, in 2020, the last year for which data is available, the country recorded just over 6,000 deaths and more than 55,000 injuries, according to a tally by the state statistics agency. A year earlier, in 2019, the same agency recorded nearly 10,000 accidents, which caused almost 3,500 deaths. The largest proportion of crashes with deaths and injuries occur outside Cairo, the capital.
The Egyptian Ministry of Health has detailed that thirty ambulances have traveled to the scene of the incident and that the injured have been transferred to the university hospital in the city of Aswan. The release He clarifies that the injured present from cuts, fractures and bruises to abrasions, although the governor of the province, General Ashraf Attia, has assured that all of them are stable.
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The country’s president, Abdelfatá Al Sisi, has released a message in his official accounts on social networks in which he has expressed his condolences to the families of the deceased and has assured that he is closely following the consequences of the collision. He has also indicated that he has ordered the corresponding authorities to provide all the necessary treatment and medical care for the victims of the incident.
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