HONG KONG - Hong Kong officials were headed Wednesday to the site of a balloon crash in Egypt that took the lives of nine Hong Kong residents when the balloon exploded into a fireball while preparing to land.
The five women and four men from Hong Kong who died in the accident Tuesday were part of a group that was on a 10-day visit to Egypt, and they were taking the balloon for a tour over the ancient temples of Luxor when it burst into flames, killing 19 people in all.
“I extend my deepest condolences to their families,” Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s chief executive, said after the accident Tuesday. “The embassy has set up a four-member team to follow up on this,” he said of the Chinese embassy in Cairo.
Immigration officers from Hong Kong had also been dispatched to Egypt to follow up on the accident and were traveling with the families of the victims to Luxor.
The disaster unfolded in just minutes as the pilot was pulling a rope to stabilize the balloon when a gas hose ripped and a fire started, security officials said. Besides the nine people from Hong Kong who were killed, the accident took the lives of four Japanese, two French, two Britons, a Hungarian and an Egyptian.
The bodies of the victims were strewn about the field where the balloon exploded.
The victims from Hong Kong were from three families who took the tour, which cost roughly $1,400 per person. The travel agency that handled the excursion, Kuoni Travel, said it was considering extra compensation for the families in addition to the $7,000 they are already eligible to receive.
The accident has posed a new challenge to Egypt’s already struggling tourism industry, which has only begun to recover from the turmoil that followed the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.
Egyptian state media reported that some of the dead had been “cremated” in the fireball. The Health Ministry said it would use DNA testing to identify the remains, although Kuoni Travel itself released the names of the Hong Kong victims, identifying them only by their family names.
Raymond Ng, a general manager for Kuoni Travel, said the agency had used the company the handled the balloon tour, Sky Cruises, regularly in the past.
“We have a set of criteria when it comes to which hot-air balloon company we use,” he said. “Most importantly, the company needs to be well known, and has taken enough safety procedures.”
Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the Japanese victims were two couples in their 60s from Tokyo, but the ministry did not release their names.
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