CAIRO: Two Nile River ferries collided Friday in northern Egypt, and close to 80 people were reported missing, security and ambulance sources said.
The sources said there were at least a dozen survivors from the accident near the northern city of Rachid. Rescuers were still searching for those thought to be missing after one of the ferries broke in half and the other overturned. The governor of the northern Beheira province said there were no confirmed fatalities, while a security source said at least three bodies had been recovered from the river.
A series of road, rail and sea accidents in Egypt in recent years has triggered an outcry over the government’s handling of transport safety. In February 2006, a ferry in the Red Sea caught fire and sank en route to Egypt from Saudi Arabia, killing 1,034 of the roughly 1,400 people on board, many of them poor workers returning home.
An Egyptian appeals court in March this year found the owner of the ferry guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to seven years in jail, reversing an earlier court decision exonerating Mamdouh Ismail, a member of Egypt’s upper house of Parliament. Egypt’s transport minister, Mohamed Mansour, resigned in October over a train crash south of Cairo, which killed 18 people.
