April 12 – According to foreign media reports, Egyptian prosecutors said on the 11th that they found that there was a major negligence of railway employees behind the fatal train collision on March 26, which caused strong protests nationwide.
Egyptian prosecutors said in a detailed statement on the 11th that they found that one of the train drivers and his assistants had stopped using the Automatic Train Control System (ATC) before the crash. ATC system is a mechanism that guides trains to run safely and involves speed control.
According to the prosecutor’s report, the investigation also showed that the assistants of the train driver and the dispatcher at a station not far from the crash site had used drugs.
Prosecutors also claimed that the guards in the control tower smoked marijuana, while the aide of the train driver used marijuana and opioid analgesics. The statement did not specify whether drugs affected their decision-making at the time of the train collision.
Prosecutors said they had not completed the investigation in the train accident.
Two Egyptian trains crashed in the Takhta area of Sohaj province on March 26, killing 18 people and injuring hundreds. The Egyptian prosecutor’s office said on March 29 that the authorities had ordered the arrest of eight people.
“The attorney general ordered two drivers, their two aides, a traffic control tower guard, the head of traffic management at Esquite and two other guards to be detained,” prosecutors said in a statement.
