A cargo ship collided with a
boat on the Nile carrying people celebrating an engagement, leaving at least 18
dead, Egyptian police said Thursday as divers searched for missing passengers.
People gathered along the banks
of the Nile River during a search for the victims of a boat accident on the
River Nile in the Warraq area of Giza, Egypt, early July 23, 2015.
The captain of the cargo boat
and his assistants were arrested following the accident late Wednesday in the
Warraq district north of Cairo, the authorities said.
A police general on the scene
told AFP that 18 corpses had been retrieved. Police and medics had earlier said
21 people were killed.
Five survivors were plucked
from the river but an unknown number were still missing, the police general
said.
At least two children
drowned, according to medical and security sources.
Witnesses said fishermen had
been first on the scene at night to pull out the corpses and survivors.
The search was initially
hampered by darkness but resumed after daybreak, with police and emergency
vessels trawling the river looking for survivors.
A rescue diver emerged from
the water empty handed as a crowd of onlookers and relatives of the passengers
gathered on the river bank, an AFP reporter said.
Rescue workers used a
mechanical digger to raise the wreckage of the party boat from the water.
"At around 8, 8:30 pm, a
big cargo ship collided with the boat," said Mostafa al-Soweissi, whose
brother had captained the chartered vessel.
"After the collision we
took fisherman boats and from 8:30 until now we took out around 19
bodies," he said, reflecting confusion over the exact toll.
- Children missing -
Ahmed Helmy, another relative
of passengers, said at least five of his family members were killed in the
accident.
"Two children are
missing," he said.
Helmy accused emergency
services of arriving late, but a health ministry official told an Egyptian
newspaper that rescue efforts had initially been hampered by the crowd.
Family and friends of a young
couple had hired the boat to celebrate their engagement. It was not clear
whether the couple were among the dead.
The captain has been detained
for four days along with three of his assistants on suspicion of manslaughter,
the official MENA news agency reported.
They are also suspected of
having operated the ship without following safety regulations, the agency
reported.
The Nile, which runs along
the length of Egypt, is dotted with cargo ships, party boats and fishing
vessels.
In 2011, at least 22 people
drowned in southern Egypt when a bus they were in slipped into the Nile from a
ferry which crashed into the river bank.
A year before, five people
drowned north of Cairo when their boat capsized.
In the deadliest accident
involving a ferry, an Egyptian vessel sank in the Red Sea in 2006 killing more
than 1,000 people.
The accident fuelled
resentment against the veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled in a
2011 popular uprising.
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