A hot air balloon crashed in Egypt over the country's ancient city of Luxor on Tuesday while carrying tourists and killed 19 people on board after it caught fire, according to reports.
Some tourists onboard the hot air balloon tried to escape the flames by leaping to their deaths before the craft crashed in a sugar cane field, the Associated Press reports. The tourists onboard included nine people from Hong Kong, four from Japan, three from England, two from France and an Egyptian pilot, Health Ministry official Khaled El- Khateeb said in a statement carried on the state-run Middle East News Agency.
The pilot had reportedly taken off in rough weather without permission from the air traffic control tower. The hot air balloon crash has prompted all further flights over the Valley of the Kings on the West Bank of the Nile to be suspended for six months for safety measures to be reassessed.
The balloon caught fire at an altitude of around 300 meters (984 feet) and there was an explosion before it went down on the west bank of the Nile, Interior Ministry spokesman Major-General Hani Abdel- Latif told Bloomberg news.
"I saw tourists catching fire and they were jumping from the balloon. They were trying to flee the fire but it was on their bodies," said Hassan Abdel-Rasoul, a farmer in al-Dhabaa. He said one of those he saw on fire was a visibly pregnant woman.
The Ministry of Tourism formed a committee to investigate the crash, according to an e-mailed statement and pledged the "harshest punishment" for anyone proven to be culpable, it said, citing minister Hisham Zazou.
This is not the first hot air balloon crash in Luxor, Egypt. In 2009, 16 tourists were injured when their balloon struck a cellphone transmission tower. A year earlier, seven tourists were injured in a similar crash.
