8 Egyptian workers burnt to death in bus crash

CAIRO: At least eight workers were burnt to death and 22 others wounded on Saturday in a bus overturn that led to its burning at a highway in the coastal city of Alexandria north of the capital Cairo, a senior official from the Egyptian Health Ministry told.

"The burn degrees of the injured people are still under assessment as we're still in the first few hours of the accident," Magdy Hegazy, the Health Ministry's Undersecretary in Alexandria, told.

The bus carried workers of a ceramic factory.

Initial investigation showed that the bus driver tried to avoid hitting a truck that abruptly veered off its course and cornered the bus, which resulted in the bus overturn.

For his part, Health Ministry's spokesman Khaled Megahed said that six of the wounded people have burn degrees of over 90 percent but the rest are much slighter.



Egypt suffers a high rate of traffic accidents that kill thousands of people every year due to lack of highway monitoring systems, inadequate road maintenance and negligence of traffic rules.

In 2016, some 14,000 traffic accidents killed over 5,300 people and injured more than 18,600 others, according to a report from the country's Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS).

The CAPMAS report said that Egypt's road accidents declined by 17.8 percent and casualties decreased by 26.8 percent in the first half of 2017 compared to the same period in 2016.

It pointed out that "human error" is responsible for 78.9 percent of road accidents in Egypt, while 13.8 of them are caused by vehicle technical problems and 5.6 percent are due to external factors including bad weather and poor road lights