CAIRO, 12 January 2006 — A bus full of Australian tourists overturned on a wet highway overnight and hit a lamppost, killing six Australians and injuring at least 24 others, including one woman who was trying to help the casualties out of the wrecked bus, Egyptian and Australian officials said yesterday. The bus that crashed was one of a convoy of two carrying 80 vacationing police officers, emergency service workers and relatives from Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory, returning to the capital after a visit to the Mediterranean city of Alexandria.

“It was just awful,” Barbara Kennedy, a passenger on the second bus, said of the accident, which took place in rain Tuesday evening on the road about 46 kilometers north of Cairo. Barbara, a nurse from Melbourne, was one of several people from the second bus who rushed to assist the injured. “The first girl I came to ... had passed away and the next person, he also was dead,” Barbara told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

The bus lay on its side by the highway yesterday, hours after the crash, its roof peeled away like a sardine can by rescue workers to pull out the victims. Nearby, a lamppost was crumpled and uprooted after being hit by the careening vehicle. The scene was littered with windowpanes, tennis shoes, as well as patches of blood and bits of human flesh.

“Everybody tried to help the injured people. We put blankets around those who were cold. We tried to get them out of the rain,” Yang Albeit, a 65-year-old Canadian nuclear scientist who was on the second bus with his son, told The Associated Press. The tour group had had “such a great day,” said Albeit as he visited the injured at Dar Al-Fouad Hospital on the outskirts of Cairo, where most of the wounded were taken. He said he had a meal earlier with one of the men who died. “It’s very sad.”

Among the injured was a policewoman from the Northern Territory from the second bus who was trying to help the victims when part of the crashed vehicle collapsed on her, said Bruce Wernham, the acting police commissioner of the Northern Territory Police, speaking from Australia to the Australian Associated Press. She was taken to the hospital with dislocated hip and fractured pelvis.

An Egyptian security official said five Australian males and one woman were killed and 26 people injured — 25 Australians and the Egyptian bus driver. An official in the prosecutor’s office said one of the dead was an eight-year-old boy. A spokeswoman for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed six Australians had died, and another 24 Australians were injured. The difference in injury tolls could not be immediately reconciled.

Speaking in a phone call from Canberra, the spokeswoman said several of the injured were in serious condition. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity — the Egyptians because they were not authorized to speak to the press, and the Australian because of government rules.

The Egyptian official blamed the accident on bad weather. However, Wernham said he had heard the bus swerved to avoid a car that was “dangerously overtaking.” Egyptian officials did not confirm this.

Mohammed Moussa, a 35-year-old travel agent who was on the second bus, dismissed the car theory. “It was because of the rain, not because of another vehicle. This is God’s destiny,” he told AP. “There was heavy rain and the driver lost control because he tried to break too hard.” Moussa said the group planned to continue its visit to Egypt and was expected to travel to the southern city of Aswan.