March 28, 2024

A head-on collision between two passenger trains injured 95 people on Monday in the south of the Tunisian capital, emergency services said.

“The injured were taken to hospitals and there were no deaths,” civil defence spokesman, Moez Triaa, told newsmen, adding that only one of the trains was carrying passengers.

He said that most of the people injured suffered bruises or fractures, but none of them was life-threatening.

Many passengers were said to be in shock, and around 15 ambulances had been dispatched to treat the wounded and to take them to the hospital.

The collision happened at 9:30 am local time in the Jbel Jelloud area, on the approach to a terminus in central Tunis.

A reporter at the site saw that the front of one of the trains had been caved in.

The cause of the accident was not yet clear and the national train company had not immediately responded to a request for comment.

Transport Minister, Rabi Majidi, visited the site of the accident but did not speak to journalists.

Tunisia’s ageing railway system had seen several deadly crashes in recent years.

Between 2017 and 2021, the country saw 173 train accidents which killed 229 people and injured 345, according to a spokesman for a governmental agency for preventing transport accidents, Achraf Yehyaoui.

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 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 signals failure.

The country of just under 12 million people also had a poor road safety record, with some 980 deaths and more than 6,500 injuries last year, according to the interior ministry.

AFP

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