CAIRO, Nov 6: At least 24 Egyptian tourism business employees and their driver were killed on Wednesday when their bus collided with a truck on a desert road as they headed home for their first iftar, police said.

All the dead as well as 24 others who were injured, some of them seriously, had left hotels and tourism businesses in the Hurghada area of the Red Sea to join their families for the first iftar, police said.

The accident happened around 60kms outside of Cairo on the road east to Suez, the city on the canal.

The driver of the tractor trailer, Bahlul Ali Assar, said the bus struck his vehicle in the rear, denying a police account that he had turned in the wrong direction into the oncoming bus.

“I suddenly felt a collision and heard a sound like an explosion,” the driver told journalists afterward.

“When I turned my head to see (what had happened), I saw bus seats and body parts flying in the air, and blood squirting everywhere, and I immediately called the police,” he said.

“The way the bus hit the truck shows that the driver of the bus was sleeping,” Assar suggested.

The bus driver, identified as Tareq Hassan Ahmed, was among the dead, police said.

The police added that they were pursuing their investigation into the circumstances of the accident.

The injured were taken to three hospitals in the Cairo area.

Police reported earlier that the bus had been travelling from Sharm el-Sheikh, which also lies on the Red Sea, though it is situated on the eastern flank of the Sinai peninsula.

It was the latest in a steady stream of accidents in Egypt involving a high number of fatalities.

Fifteen people were killed and 21 injured on October 31 when their bus hit a truck after a tire burst south of the Upper Egyptian town of Minya, police said.

Five Russian tourists and two Egyptians were killed October 15 in a traffic accident on the Hurghada-Ras Ghareb desert road along the Red Sea.

Seventeen Egyptians died and 37 were injured when their bus collided with another head-on and plunged into an irrigation canal on September 9 in El Fant, 160 kilometers south of Cairo.

Egypt’s hazardous roads and careless driving left 1,850 people dead and another 7,000 injured in road accidents last year, according to official figures.—AFP