The Hindu : 373 die in train blaze

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 21, 2002

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373 die in train blaze

AL-AYATT (Egypt), Feb. 20. Fire swept through a crowded passenger train near Cairo early today, killing at least 373 people whose charred bodies were found trapped in carriages and between the bars of windows.

``The death toll now rose to 373,'' a senior medical official said near the disaster, about 70 km south of Egypt's capital.

Firefighters managed to extinguish the blaze several hours after it engulfed seven carriages of the train just after midnight on Wednesday near the town of Al-Ayatt. About 75 injured passengers were taken to hospital.

The official Middle East News Agency said preliminary investigations showed the fire started when a gas cylinder exploded in the train's cafe.

Passengers jumped out of windows and doors to escape the flames and smoke as the train rolled on for another 8 km after the fire started, security sources said. ``We pushed each other and we were suffocating from the smoke. We threw each other out the windows,'' one survivor said from his hospital bed.

Witnesses said bars on the windows of the carriages may have prevented some people from escaping. A charred body was found wedged between the bars in one of the windows.

Inside the train, bodies were piled up at the far ends of two carriages, where the victims had apparently sought to escape the blaze. Their features were burned black beyond recognition. The train had been heading from Cairo to Luxor in the south of the country. Security sources said all the dead were believed to be Egyptians.

Witnesses said the train was overcrowded with people heading for the countryside to spend the Eid al-Adha holiday with families. The holiday is the biggest of the Muslim year.

Foreign tourists frequently travel on trains to visit ancient sites in the southern cities of Aswan and Luxor, but tend to use air-conditioned first-class or sleeper trains for security and comfort reasons. The train was an old, slow-moving model used mostly by poor Egyptians. It stopped at nearly every station because it also was used to carry daily newspapers to towns and villages along the river Nile.

Rescue workers struggled to remove bodies from about seven carriages. Ashes filled the burnt, blackened cars. The news agency said the Giza Governor, Mahmoud Abou al-Leil, had gone to the scene accompanied by several Interior Ministry and security officials.

The death toll would be Egypt's highest in a train disaster since a collision in 1995 killed 75 people. Passengers are often packed into cramped compartments like cattle. In some simple trains, people take small animals into the carriages. — Reuters

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