Fifteen killed in traffic collisions on Cairo-Assiut Agricultural Road in past 24 hours

Fifteen people have been killed since Tuesday night in two separate traffic incidents that took place within 24 hours on the portion of the Cairo-Assiut Agricultural Road that links the city of Assiut to the Dairut District.

The 62-kilometer stretch of road is notoriously dangerous, with fatal crashes occurring frequently and resulting in over 1,700 deaths in a three-year period, according to documents reviewed by Mada Masr. 

State plans to develop the highway and make it safer have progressed slowly, said one local lawmaker. 

The first incident, which took place on Tuesday night, saw a truck loaded with cement collide with a microbus, according to a statement issued by the Social Solidarity Ministry. 

Fourteen people were killed in the crash, said Assiut MP Ibrahim Nazir, who lost his own nephew to the same road in a separate incident. 

The ministry said on Tuesday that it would provide LE5,000 in immediate cash support to the families of those killed in the crash. 

One person was killed and nine were injured in a second collision on the same road on Wednesday afternoon, after a microbus crashed into a truck loaded with gas canisters, according to the domestic press. 

Despite the narrowness of the road, it remains a primary route for traffic travelling in both directions, according to Ahmed Abdel Gaber, a resident of the Nazali village in the Assiut Governorate, which lost two of its residents in Tuesday’s crash. Abdel Gaber told Mada Masr that the alternative Western Desert road is just as dangerous, lies 25 km away and is accessible only via a narrow route running through villages.

Traffic incidents on the constricted Cairo-Assuit Agricultural Road killed 1,719 people and injured 9,217 from 2017 through 2019 alone, according to Assiut Health Directorate statistics reviewed by Mada Masr. 

The casualties per year climbed steadily over that time, with 435 people killed and 2,525 injured in 2017; 586 deaths and 3,263 injuries in 2018; and 689 fatalities and 3,429 injuries in 2019. 

Assiut’s roads were ranked the second most dangerous in Egypt in 2022, according to data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, which shows that 4,568 accidents took place there that year. 

Since 2016, Nazir has submitted repeated requests to Parliament and the Cabinet calling for the road to be expanded and upgraded to curtail the rate of accidents. The Assiut MP told Mada Masr that he received a response from the Cabinet in February 2022 confirming that the road was included “in the second phase of the Haya Karima initiative for the 2022/23 fiscal year, and that “coordination efforts are currently underway to relocate obstacles and utilities."

Local and national agencies launched the first of five planned phases of the Assiut-Dairut road expansion project in 2022. The first phase was completed last year, yet Nazir said the project is progressing at an “extremely slow” pace, noting that work on the second phase has yet to begin. 

Following Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s fatalities, Nazir submitted an urgent briefing request for Transportation Minister Kamel al-Wazir and Local Development Minister Manal Awad before Parliament, calling for the resumption of the project to protect residents from frequent fatal accidents.