Two ferries collided on the Nile river in northern Egypt on Friday, killing at least three people including two children, after one boat split in two, the government Al Ahram newspaper said.
Rescue workers pulled other victims from the river near the northern city of Rosetta after the accident yesterday, the daily said.
Al Ahram said one ferry was carrying 50 people though its authorized capacity was 30.
State-run Nile TV said 50 people were missing and 12 had been hospitalized. Egypt has been hit by several ferry disasters in the past three years, killing more than 1,000 people.
Public river ferries in Egypt can sometimes be crowded, but authorities do not always record passenger numbers, making an accurate count of the missing difficult.
The two ferries were heading to Rashid City. One was a passenger ferry that broke apart during the accident while the other, carrying both passengers and cars, overturned causing no injuries or fatalities.
A series of road, rail and sea accidents in Egypt in recent years have triggered an outcry over the government’s handling of transport safety.
In 2006, a ship sank in the Red Sea while sailing from Saudi Arabia to the Egyptian port of Safaga, killing 1,034 of the 1,400 people on board.
An Egyptian appeals court in March found the owner of the ferry guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to seven years in jail, reversing an earlier court decision exonerating Mamdouh Ismail, a member of Egypt’s upper house of parliament.
In 2007, 10 people drowned at the Nile River town of Minya when a ramp connecting a ferry to land collapsed. The same year at Minya, 13 people died when a minibus fell into the Nile while boarding a ferry.
Egyptian Transport Minister Mohamed Mansour resigned in October over a train crash south of Cairo which killed 18 people.
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