MINYA, Egypt, 8 November 2004 — Thirty-three people were killed and 14 injured in Egypt yesterday when a truck crashed into a bus carrying pilgrims back home from the holy city of Makkah, police said. The truck, towing a trailer full of sugar, was trying to overtake a car when it hit the bus head-on at full speed near Minya on the River Nile, some 230 kilometers south of Cairo.
According to an AFP correspondent at the scene of the crash, the left side of the bus had been completely smashed-in by the force of the impact. Most of the victims were pilgrims returning from Saudi Arabia after performing Umrah, the minor pilgrimage, as well as Egyptian workers coming back home from the country to mark the end of Ramadan.
The Egyptian press has expressed fury in recent days over the transport conditions for pilgrims performing the Umrah, with several dozen pilgrims losing their lives on Egypt’s roads so far during the current pilgrimage season. Just three weeks ago, 14 Egyptians heading to Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage were killed when their bus overturned near the Red Sea town of Hurghada, police said. Egypt’s roads are plagued by deadly accidents, with at least 6,500 people killed each year mainly owing to the poor condition of the roads and bad driving.
Meanwhile, Egypt yesterday again rejected accusations that it was harboring a secret nuclear program, saying that its transparency could not be faulted. “The Egyptian nuclear program is clear, known and announced,” presidential spokesman Magued Abdel Fattah told reporters.
“Nuclear sites in Egypt have been subjected to inspections (by the International Atomic Energy Agency),” he added, saying that Egypt’s latest inspection was just a month ago and it underwent another three months ago.
“Egypt applies the principal of total transparency... What has been written in certain media is just an attempt to pressurize international employees into not saying on,” he added.
The accusations stemmed from a report in the French newspaper Liberation, citing unnamed Western diplomats, that the now dismantled Libyan nuclear program “had Egyptian links.”
Liberation said the charges were reaching IAEA head Mohamed El-Baradei who it said stood accused by some diplomatic missions of using his influence to put the brakes on the agency examining the issue. Egypt’s ambassador to the UN atomic agency had last week blasted the report as “totally baseless”. Egypt is believed to possess two small nuclear reactors used purely for research purposes.
In another development, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo yesterday to discuss developments in the Middle East following a statement by re-elected US President George Bush on the conflict in the Middle East.
“I discussed with President Mubarak what Bush said about the peace process in the Middle East and how it could be resumed particularly following statements by British Prime Minister Tony Blair about reviving the process being a priority for British policy,” Shara said after the one-hour meeting.
After Bush won the US presidential elections on Wednesday, Blair pledged to work with Washington to reinvigorate the Middle East peace process. Blair is expected in Washington this week to discuss both the situation in Iraq and the Middle East peace process.“This is a positive development particularly as the past three or four years have been totally lost where this issue is concerned and therefore allowed interpretations that are not in the interest of the peace process or stability in this region,” Shara said.
Syria has been under increased political pressure from the US, with Bush in December 2003 signing an act that allows economic and diplomatic sanctions on Syria.
