Egypt’s National Railway Authority said that at least twenty people have been killed and forty others injured by a large fire at the main railway station in its capital, Cairo.
They said the fire erupted when a train collided with a concrete buffer stop at Ramses Station in the city centre though dozens of ambulances and fire engines rushed to the scene.
The train’s fuel tank reportedly exploded after the crash, setting a platform and nearby buildings on fire.
Egypt’s railway system has a poor safety record, which many people blame on a lack of investment by successive governments and poor management.
It would be recalled that in August 2017, forty-three people were killed and more than a hundred injured when two passenger trains collided outside the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria while the country’s deadliest rail accident occurred near Cairo in 2002, when a fire ripped through an overcrowded passenger train, killing more than three hundred and seventy people.
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