14 killed in road accident in southern Cairo

CAIRO, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- At least 14 people were killed and seven others wounded in a car accident in Beni Sweif province some 120 km south of the capital Cairo, the Egyptian Health Ministry said in a statement Saturday.

"The accident took place as a passenger minibus collided with another vehicle at the Eastern Desert Highway in Beni Sweif," said Health Ministry's Spokesman Khaled Megahed in the statement.

He added that 15 ambulances had rushed to the scene to move the bodies and send injured people to nearby hospitals.

A similar crash that took place a couple of days ago on the same road also claimed 13 lives.

Egypt suffers a high rate of traffic accidents that kill thousands of people every year due to lack of highway monitoring systems, poor road maintenance and negligence of traffic rules.

In 2016, some 14,000 traffic accidents killed over 5,300 people and injured more than 18,600 others, according to a report from the country's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS).

It stated that Egypt's road accidents declined by 17.8 percent and casualties decreased by 26.8 percent in the first half of 2017 compared to the same period in 2016.

The CAPMAS report pointed out that "human error" is responsible for 78.9 percent of road accidents in Egypt, while 13.8 of them took place due to vehicle technical problems and 5.6 percent due to external factors including bad weather and poor road lights. Enditem