CAIRO: A 45-year old man was killed and 18 peoplewere injured Friday in a car accident in Upper Egypt’s governorate of Minya, Youm7 reported.
The accident took place after a public transportation minibus flipped over on the Cairo-Aswan desert road south of Minya.
Minya security director Major General Mohamed al-Helbawy said the minibus driver lost control of the car because of over-speeding, Youm7 reported.
The dead person was transferred to Minya public morgue while the injured are being hospitalized, Helbawy added.
Road safety in Egypt is of a great concern. According to a report issued by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) in April 2015, an average of 17 people died per day in road accidents in Egypt in 2014.
A total of 14,403 road accidents took place in Egypt in 2014, 7.5 percent less than in 2013, according to the report.
Human error caused 59.2 percent of all 2014 road accidents, while 19.3 percent were caused by technical failure, the report said.
A 2011 report by CAPMAS showed that Egypt has the Middle East’s highest road fatality rate.
Laws regulating seatbelt and blood alcohol testing have been recently issued to lessen road accidents plaguing the Arab world’s most populous country, but the rate of road accidents does not indicate that these laws are enough nor are properly enforced.