JBEL JELLOUD, Tunisia — A head-on collision between two passenger trains
injured 95 people Monday in the south of the
Tunisian capital, emergency
services said.
اضافة اعلان
“The injured were
taken to hospitals and there were no deaths,” civil defense spokesman Moez
Triaa told AFP, adding that only one of the trains was carrying passengers.
Most of the
injured suffered bruises or fractures, none of them life-threatening, he said.
Many passengers were
in shock, he added, saying around 15 ambulances had been dispatched to treat
the wounded or take them to hospital.
The collision
happened at 9:30am local time (08:30 GMT) in the Jbel Jelloud area, on the
approach to a terminus in central Tunis.
An AFP reporter at
the site saw the front of one of the trains had been caved in.
The cause of the
accident is not yet clear and the
SNCFT national train company did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.
Transport Minister
Rabi Majidi visited the site of the accident but did not speak to journalists.
Tunisia’s aging
railway system has seen several deadly crashes in recent years.
Between 2017 and
2021, the country saw 173 train accidents which killed 229 people and injured
345, said Achraf Yehyaoui, spokesman for a governmental agency for preventing
transport accidents.
At least five
people were killed and more than 50 injured in late 2016 when a train slammed
into a public bus near the site of Monday’s crash.
An official said
signals and safety gates had been out of service at the time of the crash.
The 2016 accident
prompted the sacking of SNCFT chief Sabiha Derbal.
The previous year,
the
North African country experienced one of its worst railway disasters, with
18 people killed when a train hit a lorry and derailed at a level crossing
south of the capital because of a signals failure.
The country of just under
12 million people also has a poor road safety record, with some 980 deaths and
more than 6,500 injuries last year according to the interior ministry.
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