At least 60 people were injured when a passenger train derailed in Egypt's Giza province on Sunday, state media reported, citing a preliminary toll. The train came off the tracks near the village of Gerza in the Al-Ayyat district, south of Cairo, and several carriages overturned.

Ambulances rushed to the scene and took the injured to nearby hospitals, according to Anadolu Agency, citing Egyptian state media. The Egyptian Ambulance Authority declared a state of emergency and dispatched 12 fully equipped ambulances to the site. Local media reported that the injuries ranged from minor to moderate, and that the overturned carriages had caused panic among passengers.

Egypt's railway authority sent maintenance and technical teams to inspect the site, clear the wreckage and restore train services, which were heavily disrupted by the accident. The train was travelling on the line linking Cairo with Aswan in Upper Egypt, one of the country's busiest north-south routes, and services on the corridor were suspended while recovery work continued.

Cause under investigation

Security authorities are investigating the cause of the derailment, the Al-Akhbar newspaper reported. An official report on the incident has been filed, and the Public Prosecution has taken over the investigation to identify the technical and operational causes behind the carriages leaving the tracks.

The casualty figure is a preliminary toll and may change as hospitals complete their counts and the authorities release fuller details. No confirmed deaths had been reported in the state media accounts available on Sunday, and the exact number of carriages that left the rails had not been officially confirmed.

A busy and ageing network

Al-Ayyat, in the Giza governorate, sits on the railway corridor running south from Cairo along the Nile towards Upper Egypt. The line carries heavy passenger traffic between the capital and the cities of the south, and any closure on it quickly disrupts travel across a large part of the country.

Egypt's railway is one of the oldest in the world: Egyptian National Railways was founded in 1854, making it the oldest railway system in Africa and the Middle East, and it still carries around 800 million passengers a year. That scale means even a single accident on a main line affects large numbers of travellers, and the network has suffered a series of serious accidents in recent years.

The derailment will add to pressure on the authorities over track maintenance and safety on the Cairo-Aswan line. Investigators will now examine the condition of the track and rolling stock at Gerza, the speed of the train, and whether any warning signs were missed before the carriages left the rails.