Sunday’s wreck on the line out of Cairo left a grim tally from the health ministry: four lives lost, 88 people hurt, and a locomotive driver listed among the victims. The pile-up took place around 52 kilometres south of the capital, in al-Ayyat in Giza province, on the stretch that links the Kafr Ammar and Al-Raqqa stations.
Railway managers explained that a train going from Giza to the Fayoum oasis ran into the tail of another that had left Cairo for Aswan. Coaches jumped the track. Pictures circulated by news agencies show one carriage mashed on top of a second and others that had slid down a bank. What went wrong has not been established.
Rescue work was heavy. Officials counted 72 ambulances and sent the wounded to three clinics placed on standby. Heavy lifting gear arrived so that twisted wagons could be moved and the rails cleared. Traffic toward Upper Egypt from Giza has been paused in the meantime.
In a public note President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said he was watching events with “great concern”, sent his sympathy to grieving families and told state bodies to treat the injured and to look promptly into how the smash occurred. Anyone shown to have been careless, he added, should face consequences.
For many Egyptians the place name itself stirs older memories. In 2002 a blaze on a train at al-Ayyat claimed more than 370 lives, still the deadliest episode on the national network, which is the longest-established railway in Africa and the Middle East. Another fatal meeting of trains near Alexandria in 2017 cost more than forty lives, and as recently as last September two freight locomotives collided in the same district, leaving a driver and his assistant hurt. This latest accident still awaits an official explanation.
