13 dead in traffic accident in Upper Egypt's Aswan

At least 13 people were killed and seven others injured on Thursday as a truck hit a passenger minibus on a desert highway in Upper Egypt's province of Aswan.

"Once the accident took place, we sent 15 ambulances to the scene," Ehab Hanafy, undersecretary of the Egyptian health ministry in Aswan, told Xinhua.

He added that the victims were taken to a morgue in Aswan General Hospital and those injured to Aswan University Hospital.

Egypt suffers a high rate of traffic accidents that kill thousands of people every year mostly due to negligence of traffic rules and high speed.

"Egypt loses about 12,000 lives due to road traffic crashes every year," said a report by the World Health Organization in 2018, which stated that about 1.3 million people die annually on the world's roads.

On the other hand, Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, the country's official statistics authority, said in December 2019 that deaths caused by road accidents declined by 44.2 percent in Egypt between 2015 and 2018.