Egypt pick-up crash kills 18, many children, source says

At least 18 people, many of them children aged 13 or 14, were killed Tuesday when two pick-up trucks carrying agricultural day labourers crashed in the Dawawis area of Ismailia governorate in northern Egypt, a local medical source told AFP.

Egypt's health ministry had earlier said there were 47 casualties, including around 30 injured people. The local medical source said most of the dead were children aged 13 and 14, but could not immediately give an exact breakdown. Local media outlet Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that the youngest victims were two 10-year-old girls.

The workers, mostly from two villages in the Nile Delta governorate of Sharqiya, were employed on an Ismailia farm, a local security source told AFP.

Jomana Waleed, a 16-year-old survivor, told AFP she had been asleep in the pick-up with her siblings when it crashed. She said her sister died beside her after saying she wanted to see their mother. Waleed was released from hospital Tuesday with a slight back injury, while her brother Mohamed was sent to another hospital, their grandmother Nour Ahmed Abdulkader told AFP.

Families gathered outside Al-Qasasin Hospital in Ismailia on Tuesday waiting for news of relatives, an AFP correspondent reported.

Local media reported that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had directed authorities to immediately investigate the cause of the crash.

Dangerously overcrowded pick-ups are a regular form of transport for millions of Egyptian informal workers, including child labourers. Official figures say at least 1.3 million minors are engaged in some form of child labour in Egypt.

Informal labour accounts for nearly 67 percent of employment in Egypt and almost the entire agricultural sector, according to the International Labour Organization. Between eight million and 13 million people are estimated to work as irregular day labourers, mostly in agriculture, construction and manufacturing, with limited wage and safety protections.

Road accidents are common in Egypt, where traffic rules are unevenly enforced and many roads are in poor repair.