Dubai: At least eight people were killed and 44 injured on Thursday morning in a collision between a bus and truck on Abu Simbel-Aswan Road in Upper Egypt, state-owned news agency Mena said.
Aswan governorate’s health authorities have despatched more than 20 ambulances to the scene. The injured were transferred to Aswan University Hospital.
There were 56 passengers onboard the bus, which was coming from Sudan. According to Ahmad Mesilhy, a security officer at the Aswan Security Directorate, the majority of the victims were Sudanese.
Last month, a car crash in Aswan killed two people and wounded eight others on Edfu-Marsa Alam Road.
Egypt reported a drop of 28.9 per cent in road traffic injuries and 8.9 per cent in deaths in 2020 compared to the year before, the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics said in a report issued in November 2021.
The decline is attributed to intensified national efforts to improve the country’s road network through the National Road Project, which was launched in 2014.
The project has successfully developed and extended Egypt’s 23,500km road network that has built 5,500km of new roads, 7,500km have been developed, and 900 bridges have been constructed in the past eight years.
