The bus entered collision with a car on the long desert road leading to the two temples of Abu Simbel. Fourteen other tourists were injured in the accident.
Le Monde and AFP
Ten people – Five Egyptians, four French and a Belgian – were killed, Wednesday, April 13, in an accident of Car in Aswan, in the South Tourism of Egypt, which is struggling to get up of ten years of political instability and the epidemic of COVID-19.
Fourteen other tourists were injured – eight French and six Belgians – when the bus collided with a car on the long desert road leading to the two temples of Abu Simbel, early in the morning, added the governorate of Aswan. All wounded are in a “stable state” after being hospitalized for “fractures, bruises and superficial injuries,” he says. A photographer from the France-Press agency saw the fully calcined bus lying on the edge of this asphalt language.
Traffic accidents are common in Egypt, where roads are often poorly maintained and the highly respected road code. Officially, seven thousand people lost their lives in accidents in 2020 in this most populous country in the Arab world (103 million inhabitants).
Tourism barely
The temples of Abu Simbel, more than 3,000 years old, displaced from their original location to prevent them from being submerged by the rise of the Nile waters with the construction of the Assouan dam in the The 1960-1970, are one of the main sights of Egypt.
Cut in the rock on a hill overlooking the Nile, they are dedicated to Osiris and Isis and were built by one of the most famous pharaohs, Ramses II (1279-1213 BC). Abu Simbel is one of the jewels of the former Nubia, whose borders extended along the Nile, sharing its territory between the current Egypt and Sudan. But if the site has long drove from tourists, it is today much less attended.
After years of political instability related to the 2011 popular revolt, which have brought a hard blow to the key sector of tourism, Egypt had just managed to bring back visitors in 2019, including promoting its Antique Heritage.
But in 2020, because of the Pandemic of Covid-19, the revenues of tourism – which employs two million Egyptians and generates more than 10% of the gross domestic product (GDP) – have plunged from 13 billion at 4 billion dollars.
In August 2021, Russia resumed its flights, interrupted for six years after a deadly crash, invigorating this sector in the half.
Accidents and Attacks
But the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army put a brutal stop at the recovery, while these two countries accounted for 40% of the tourist arrivals in Egypt, mainly on the Red Sea. The French and Belgians, on the other hand, are the first contingents of visitors to the pharaonic sites of Luxor and Aswan.
The Plan of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, who now hears in the paragon of stability in an Middle Eastern torn by violence, organizes very regular visits to diplomats, bloggers and other influencers to restore his tourist coat of arms . Cairo even authorizes the entry of several tens of new nationalities without a prior visa.
If the attacks against bloody tourists in the 1990s – have greatly weakened, accidents take place regularly.
a louxor (the ancient thebes), where is the grave of the famous Pharaoh Tutankhamun, in the valley of the kings, 250 kilometers north of Aswan, a German tourist and two Egyptian girls were dead in the collapse of A building in a residential area in February 2019.
In May 2020, an attack had targeted another high place for Egyptian tourism, the pyramids of Giza (southwestern Cairo), making seventeen wounded at one month from the beginning of the African Cup of Nations. football in the country.