Bus Crash Kills 8 Americans in Egypt

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The wreckage of a bus that crashed in Egypt on Sunday, killing eight American tourists.

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CAIRO — Eight Americans were killed Sunday when their tour bus collided with a parked truck full of sand on a dimly lighted desert road, officials and local news reports said.
Twenty-one Americans and two Egyptian tour operators were injured in the accident, which occurred around dawn on a road from the southern Egyptian city of Aswan to the historic Abu Simbel temple.
“It was a lousy Christmas,” said Laura Light, 76, a retired French professor from San Francisco who was taken to the hospital with mild injuries. She was on a Christmas cruise down the Nile with her husband, Leon Light, 87, a retired federal agent who had broken six ribs in the crash.
“My husband was trapped between two chairs and he couldn’t move, but the woman next to me was very crushed,” Ms. Light said, “and her husband was dead.”
The Egyptian military transported a dozen of the injured to a hospital in Cairo for treatment, the American embassy said in a statement.
Passengers said their tour left Aswan at about 5:00 a.m., driving in pitch darkness on a narrow desert road toward Abu Simbel when the bus hit the truck.
About 8,000 people die from traffic accidents each year in Egypt, where two-way desert roads frequently have only one lane, street lamps are rare and traffic laws are often ignored.
The bus operator was the Misr Sinai tour company, a 30-year-old enterprise founded and partly owned by the Egyptian government. Company officials declined to comment.