Egypt Train Crash Death Toll Rises to 7, More Than 100 Injured in Al-Ayyat
The death toll from Sunday’s train collision south of Cairo has risen to at least seven, Egypt’s health ministry said, as rescue teams continued to work through the wreckage and prosecutors warned the count could still climb.
More than 100 people were injured when a train travelling from Giza to Fayoum ran into the back of a stationary Cairo-to-Aswan service between Kafr Ammar and Al-Raqqa stations, in the Al-Ayyat district of Giza province, about 50 kilometres south of the capital. Several carriages derailed and fell down an embankment. The first official count, issued hours after the crash, put the toll at four dead and 88 injured; the ministry revised both figures upward through the day as hospitals reported in, with injury counts reported at different times as 112, 114 and more than 125.
A train driver is among the dead, the Chief Prosecutor’s Office said. Some of the victims were trapped inside the stationary train. More than 70 ambulances raced to the scene, and the injured were taken to hospitals across Giza and neighbouring Beni Suef, including 54 people brought to Al Wasta Hospital and 10 to Al Ayyat Hospital. The health ministry said more than 70 of the injured had already been discharged after treatment, many of them for broken bones and head injuries.
Railway officials identified the two services as train No. 134, the Giza-to-Fayoum regional train, and train No. 2010 on the Cairo-to-Aswan line. Prosecutors say the Fayoum-bound train struck the rear of the Aswan service, which was standing on the same track. No official cause has been announced. Our earlier report on the collision carries the first account of the crash and the rescue operation.
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said he had ordered a swift investigation. “Hold accountable anyone found to have been negligent,” he said, according to statements carried by Egyptian state media. Investigators from the Public Prosecution Office arrived at the site on Sunday evening to examine the rolling stock, the signalling and the condition of the track. Transport Minister Kamel al-Wazir visited the scene as calls grew for his resignation, and train services between Cairo and Upper Egypt remain suspended while cranes clear the wreckage.
Al-Ayyat has a grim place in Egypt’s railway history. It was the site of the country’s deadliest rail disaster, a fire that swept through a Cairo-to-Luxor train in February 2002 and killed more than 370 people. A rear-end collision in the same district in 2009 killed 18. The latest crash follows other recent disasters — 32 people killed at Sohag in 2021, more than 20 killed in a fire at Cairo’s Ramses station in 2019, and three killed in a derailment near Matrouh in August 2025. Each time, officials promised a full inquiry and a safer railway; each time, another crash followed. Spain went through the same painful revision of its own toll after the Toledo rail disaster, where the death count kept rising for days as rescuers reached the wreckage.
Why this matters goes beyond Egypt. The country’s railways carry millions of passengers a day, many of them workers and students who have no other affordable way to travel, and the network has been the subject of a long-running, expensive modernisation programme. When a train runs into the back of another on a main line, the question is not only what failed on Sunday afternoon in Al-Ayyat, but whether the systems meant to stop exactly this kind of collision — automatic train control, working signals, clear procedures — were in place and working. Until prosecutors report, that question has no answer, and the families of the seven dead are left with the same wait Egyptian rail passengers have endured after every crash before this one.
