Survivors Recall Rail Inferno in Egypt

Ali Thabet climbed out the window of a speeding train and held on for his life Wednesday as flames rushed through his carriage, leaped into the next carriage, and the next and the next and the next, leaving hundreds of passengers charred beyond recognition in a horrific railway disaster.

Thabet jumped and survived. His father, Ali Moustafa, did too.

“I just tried to save my life,” Thabet, 20, said as he sat at his father’s hospital bed while rescue workers pulled bodies from the wreckage. “I held on until the fire made my feet and legs burn, then I let go.”

The third-class passenger train had been packed with men, women and children crammed into every conceivable space. Tickets were less than a dollar for the 300-mile journey from Cairo to the southern city of Luxor on the state-owned train. Most of the passengers were headed home to celebrate the Islamic feast of Eid al-Adha, which marks the end of the hajj pilgrimage and Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son.

About 400 people never made it.

Officials said the fire started about 12:30 a.m., an hour after the train pulled out of the capital. It apparently began in the cafe car, at one end of the train, when a gas canister used for cooking exploded.

Officials said that for some reason, the train traveled for about four miles after the fire broke out, the air rushing through missing or broken windows, fueling the flames as they consumed one carriage after another. When the train finally stopped, it took several hours to put out the blaze.

The circumstances were still under investigation. What was clear, however--to the witnesses who saw passengers hurling themselves from windows, to the rescue workers who struggled to pull apart fused bodies and to the passengers who survived--was that the train was so overcrowded, almost no one could get to the exits.

Each carriage was meant to hold about 150 passengers, but some at the scene said it seemed as if twice as many were packed in.

“The fire started to get really close,” said Yassir Fouad Mohammad, 28, who also jumped from a window. “But there was no place for us to get out. We couldn’t get through to the doors because of the crowds.”

Grilles on some of the windows also hampered escapes.

Witnesses described panicked women, their dresses on fire, rushing forward and slamming into a wall of passengers. They surged forward together and died together, one on top of the other. The official death toll was about 370, but authorities said it could go higher.

“The dead people were all piled up in one place in each car, like they were trying to escape,” said Mamdouh Salem, one of the first ambulance attendants on the scene.

By midday, seven carriages sat atop a low ridge overlooking fields where farmers work the land the way their ancestors did centuries ago, with bare hands, bare feet and beasts of burden. Helmeted riot police blocked them from getting near what was left of the train.

Outside, the cars were seared of their paint. Inside, workers struggled to pull out the remains. The heat had been so intense that everything--luggage, seats and people--had melded. A railroad crossing alarm clanged nonstop as they worked.

Twelve miles up the road, at the hospital in the village of Ayyat, the morgue was filled beyond capacity and 36 survivors were being treated, mostly for burns and trauma caused by jumping from the train. The hospital manager said 19 passengers with serious burns had been moved to Cairo for treatment.

“I am looking for my brother,” Hisham Mohammad said as he sat outside the hospital, tears running down his face, knowing in his heart that if his brother Sadek wasn’t in the hospital, he was in the morgue, or still in the train.

Hundreds of personal tragedies like Mohammad’s were quickly becoming a very public emergency for the government.

Egyptian authorities have been in crisis mode for months, facing a serious economic problem that was exacerbated when tourism plunged after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. The authorities’ approach to the fiscal woes has been to insist that nothing was seriously wrong. That was the same approach they took with the train fire.

“All trains are in good shape and at the highest degree of efficiency, and they are reviewed completely,” said Prime Minister Atef Abeid, who traveled to the fire scene and then to the village hospital and ordered a full investigation.

The prime minister had joined other government leaders who parked their fleets of Mercedes-Benzes across from the recovery operation. Top officials, including Mahmoud abu Leia, governor of neighboring Giza province, pulled out folding chairs and sat in the shade.

Yes, he wanted an investigation, Abu Leia said, but he too explained the tragedy as an accident, an aberration, something that could happen anywhere. He also emphasized that Egyptians alone had died--as opposed to tourists, whose dollars officials are desperate to lure back to the nation.

“Upper Egypt has dozens of trains that pass through it every day,” Abu Leia said as he sipped a diet soda. “It is totally safe. But unfortunately this accident happened in one of the local trains that carry only Egyptians, which is different from the trains that carry tourists.”

He said that when the conductor realized that the train was on fire, he managed to have the burning cars separated from three cars in the front that were still safe. While the speeding inferno coasted to a stop, he continued on to Luxor, Abu Leia said.

Asked whether he was upset at the lack of fire exits, or the overcrowding, or the decision of the engineer to keep going, he dismissed such concerns, although he said the officials obviously cared because they had come to the scene.

“Such accidents happen everywhere, in Europe, in India,” he said. “Each car has more than one door that passengers can use to get in and out.”

When Abu Leia finished speaking, an overcrowded third-class train passed by on the southbound tracks. People were standing in the aisles and sitting in the doorways.

Egyptians are accustomed to such government responses. Occasionally they rise in a spasm of anger, as in 1977, when the price of bread was raised. Score of people died when riots ensued.

There was some frustration with the government’s defensive posture over the train system.

“I have never seen such a shameless prime minister,” said Hisham Kassem, an Egyptian human rights activists and publisher of the English-language Cairo Times. “When did he have the time to check on the condition of the railway station to say that they are safe? If this government can find a scapegoat, it will.”

By late Wednesday, Egypt’s state-owned news channels hadn’t broadcast any details of the tragedy except to say that there had been a fire on a Luxor-bound train.

“It is an accident. It happens,” Mahmoud abu Yousef, 52, said as he bought oranges in the nearby village of Abu Radwan al Kibli. “We are faithful [religious] people. No one came and killed them.”

A crowd surged forward to hear a discussion of the disaster. Most expressed a bit of fatalism, saying that when one’s time comes, nothing can be done. But Mahmoud Mohammad, 27, wasn’t as willing to let the authorities off the hook.

“The government should have better safety measures on trains,” he said, elbowing his way to the front of the crowd. “They take better care of tourists. We want them to take care of us too.”