Some 58 Egyptian passengers were killed and 144 others injured on Monday morning when a train rammed into the rear part of another in a village north of Cairo.

"The number of victims has risen to 58 dead and 143 wounded, including four in serious condition," the Egyptian Health Minister Hatem el-Gabali was quoted by Egypt's official MENA news agency as saying.

Earlier reports had put the death toll at 65 people and the number of wounded at 140.

The accident occurred at about 7:30 a.m. (0430 GMT) in Qalyoub, a quiet small village in the Governorate of Qalyubiya, just 20 km north of Cairo.

The collision took place when a train coming from Mansoura, about 120 km north of the capital, bound for Cairo neglected signals to stop and rammed into the rear car of the other train, which came from Banha, capital of Qalyubiya Governorate, to Cairo.

Witnesses living in a nearby five-story building told Xinhua that the train from Mansoura was then stopping on the rail when the one from Banha, travelling at a high speed, rammed into the standing train.

A witness named Ahmed, who is in his 20s, said that he was just coming back to his home in the building after a night shift in Cairo when he heard a short yet terribly loud noise.

"I rushed to the balcony and saw the two trains colliding into each other. The locomotive of one train and the rear car of the other train caught fire immediately, and people were jumping to escape from the windows," he said.

The scene was really horrible and it was like a movie, he said.

Split train parts, with railcars out of shape, a half locomotive, shoes and blood-soaked clothes could still be seen at the scene hours after the accident. In the air there was a bad blood smell.

The locomotive of the train from Banha was severely damaged with half of its parts smashed and scattered on railbed and nearby maize field, while the two rear railcars of the train from Mansoura had been reduced to heaps of metal.

Egyptian rescue workers were trying to remove the wracks so that railway transportation could be back into normalcy as soon as possible.

At Qalyoub hospital, one of the hospitals where the injured were rushed to for treatment, Director Loutfi Ismail Wali told Xinhua that his hospital had received altogether five bodies of the passengers so far, including two of the passengers who had died on the way to the hospital.

About 56 injured passengers were receiving treatment in the hospital, among whom was a 48-year-old man named Abd Elhadi.

Elhadi said he was then sitting in the third railcar from the rear when his train was hit by the other.

"I heard a really loud noise and felt heavy shaking before I lose my consciousness. When I wake up, I found myself in this hospital," said Elhadi, adding that other passengers had pulled him out from the window and rushed him to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Head of the Egyptian National Railways Authority Hanafi Abd el-Qawi had attributed the cause of the train crash to human mistake, rather than technical failure, MENA reported.

Egyptian Minister of Social Solidarity Ali Muselhi told reporters that the family of each victim would get 5,000 Egyptian pounds (US$871 U.S. dollars) in compensation while those injured would receive 1,000 pounds (US$174 dollars).

Monday's train crash was the most serious one in the last four years in Egypt. On May 1, a cargo train collided head-on with a passenger train in the Governorate of Sharqiya, leaving 65 people injured.

(Xinhua News Agency August 23, 2006)