CAIRO: Angry residents attacked a railway guard and his post in a town outside Cairo on Monday after a train ran over and killed two children crossing a train intersection that was closed to pedestrians, officials said.
A crowd descended on the intersection near the town of Bilaydah in the city of Al-Ayat, where a train earlier killed two children trying to cross, according to the Egyptian National Railways.
They attacked the guard who was securing the level crossing and set fire to his room, officials said. It wasn’t immediately clear what happened to the guard.
Local media reported that the two children were on their way to school.
Train accidents are common in Egypt. A train crash earlier this month killed one person and injured more than 20 others in southern Egypt.
In recent years, the government has announced initiatives to improve railways.
Crowd in Egypt attacks a railway guard after 2 children are run over
https://arab.news/g6783
Crowd in Egypt attacks a railway guard after 2 children are run over
- A crowd descended on the intersection near the town of Bilaydah in the city of Al-Ayat, where a train earlier killed two children trying to cross
- Officials said they attacked a guard and set fire to his room. It wasn’t immediately clear what happened to the guard
Algeria parliament to vote on law declaring French colonization ‘state crime’
- The vote comes as the two countries are embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis
ALGERIA: Algeria’s parliament is set to vote on Wednesday on a law declaring France’s colonization of the country a “state crime,” and demanding an apology and reparations.
The vote comes as the two countries are embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis, and analysts say that while Algeria’s move is largely symbolic, it could still be politically significant.
The bill states that France holds “legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused,” according to a draft seen by AFP.
The proposed law “is a sovereign act,” parliament speaker Brahim Boughali was quoted by the APS state news agency as saying.
It represents “a clear message, both internally and externally, that Algeria’s national memory is neither erasable nor negotiable,” he added.
France’s colonization of Algeria from 1830 until 1962 remains a sore spot in relations between the two countries.
French rule over Algeria was marked by mass killings and large-scale deportations, all the way to the bloody war of independence from 1954-1962.
Algeria says the war killed 1.5 million people, while French historians put the death toll lower at 500,000 in total, 400,000 of them Algerian.
French President Emmanuel Macron has previously acknowledged the colonization of Algeria as a “crime against humanity,” but has stopped short of offering an apology.
Asked last week about the vote, French foreign ministry spokesman Pascal Confavreux said he would not comment on “political debates taking place in foreign countries.”
Hosni Kitouni, a researcher in colonial history at the University of Exeter in the UK, said that “legally, this law has no international scope and therefore is not binding for France.”
But “its political and symbolic significance is important: it marks a rupture in the relationship with France in terms of memory,” he said.
