Egyptian Train Crash Kills 51

At least 51 people were killed and 138 injured when two commuter trains collided near Cairo today.

The crash happened in the town of Qalyub, 12 miles (19 kilometres) north of the Egyptian capital.

Adly Hussein, the provincial governor, told Egyptian state television that two southbound commuter trains had collided at around 7am local time (0500 BST).

Television footage showed the crumpled front of one train, with carriages lying on their sides next to the track which was littered with clothes and shoes and spattered with blood.

Cranes and bulldozers were used to move parts of the damaged trains. Rescue workers were seen making their way into the wreckage to look for survivors while a man's bloodied forearm protruded from a crushed car.

The trains had been travelling from the Nile Delta cities of Mansoura and Benha. Police said the Mansoura train had missed a stop signal while travelling at a speed of at least 50mph. The driver was killed in the crash, which saw at least four of the carriages overturn and a fire break out.

"The first train was stopped. We looked and saw the other train coming from behind, screeching," said Khalil Sheikh Khalil, who had disembarked from a minibus nearby just before the crash happened.

"We kept saying: 'Driver, driver, a train is coming.' So the [train] driver moved up 15 metres and, while he was moving, the two trains impacted," he told Reuters.

A Qalyub resident living near the train tracks who assisted in the rescue effort and the removal of bodies from the train said that most of the passengers were men ranging in age from 20 to 50.

"I carried so many dead people, many of them were just body parts, my own clothes were soaked in blood," said Raslan Abdel-Aziz, an armed forces mechanic.

Crowds of up to 1,000 gathered around the scene of the accident, held back by chains of security police and officials calling for blood donations over loudhailers.

The Nile Delta - the most densely populated part of Egypt - is where the majority of crashes on the country's troubled railway network take place.

In May, 45 people were killed when two trains crashed at a station in the Delta village of Alshat. Three months earlier, 20 died in a collision near the port city of Alexandria.

In the country's worst rail disaster, 363 people were killed when fire broke out on a train in 2002. It had been packed with people travelling to southern Egypt for Eid al-Adha, an Islamic festival marking the end of the hajj pilgrimage.