Egypt road crash kills nine and injures 13

Police say two pick-up trucks collided in Minya province

Wreckage from a deadly crash on the outskirts of Minya, Egypt. At least nine people were killed in another crash in the area on Sunday. AFP

Nine people were killed and 13 injured in a motorway accident in the southern Egyptian province of Minya on Sunday.

Police said a large pick-up truck carrying a group of labourers collided with a smaller pick-up on one of the province’s main routes.

Emergency services were quickly on the scene and those injured were taken to a nearby hospital.

A police statement said an investigation had been launched into the cause of the accident and witnesses would be interviewed.

Photos posted on social media on Sunday showed the families of the victims crowding outside the area’s Samalut Hospital to receive the remains of loved ones or visit family and friends who were injured.

Despite multibillion-dollar efforts to improve its road network, accidents remain prevalent in the Arab world’s most populous nation, killing 6,164 people last year. The 2021 death toll represents an 8.3 per cent increase from the previous year.

On August 3, a crash in the Upper Egyptian province of Sohag killed 17 people when a minibus full of passengers crashed into a large truck on one of the city’s motorways.

Earlier last month, a road accident in Minya killed 23 people and injured 30.

The accident occurred when a passenger bus collided with a lorry near the town of Malawy, about 200km south of Cairo.

President Abdel Fattah El Sisi launched the National Roads Project in 2014, aiming to overhaul 23,000km of roads nationwide in an effort to reduce the number of traffic accidents in Egypt.

However, many experts have said that one of the reasons Egypt has such a high rate of road accidents is reckless driving, especially on motorways, where large cargo lorries are often driven at high speeds.

A lack of proper enforcement of the country’s traffic laws has also been blamed for the accident rate.

A World Health Organisation report issued in June 2021 said that out of the 1.3 million people killed across the world each year in road accidents, more than 90 per cent of them occur in “low and middle-income countries”.