Six Australians killed in Cairo bus crash

Television footage shows a bus lying on its side after crashing on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road in Eqypt. Picture / Reuters TV

CANBERRA - Six Australians were killed when their tour bus crashed in bad weather outside the Egyptian capital Cairo.

Another 27 people were injured, with four of them in critical condition and one facing the prospect of paraplegia, the ABC reported.

A team of neuro, cardio-thoracic and plastic surgeons were working on the injured, the ABC said.

The bus was one of two carrying 80 holidaying police officers, emergency service workers and relatives from Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory.

They were returning Cairo after a visit to the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria when the bus crashed in wet weather at 8.45pm Tuesday local time (7.45am NZT Wednesday).

An Egyptian security official said those killed were five men and a woman, while an official in the prosecutor's office said one of the dead was an eight-year-old boy.

Victoria Police said late yesterday that five Victorians - two police officers and "three other members of the Victorian community" - were among the dead.

In a press conference outside Dar El Fouad Hospital in Cairo, where most of the injured were taken, the head of the hospital said 27 people were injured, ABC TV reported.

Witnesses described the ground around the crash site as spattered with blood and bits of human flesh, amid broken panes of glass and tennis shoes.

The bus lay on its side by the highway, its roof peeled away like a sardine can by rescue workers to pull out the victims.

"It was just awful," said Barbara Kennedy, a nurse from Melbourne who was on the second bus and rushed to assist the injured.

"The first girl I came to ... had passed away and the next person, he also was dead," Kennedy told ABC radio.

Among the injured was a woman helping the casualties out of the wrecked bus, Egyptian and Australian officials said.

"Everybody tried to help the injured people. We put blankets around those who were cold. We tried to get them out of the rain," 65-year-old Canadian nuclear scientist Yang Albeit, who was on the second bus with his son, told The Associated Press.

The hospital official, whom the ABC did not name, said 26 people were being treated there, while the remaining person was at another hospital "in too critical a state to be moved".

- AAP