CAIRO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- At least 12 people were killed and 28 others injured Thursday in an accident on a desert highway in southern Egypt's Minya province, the Egyptian Health Ministry said in a statement.

A cement-laden truck overturned and hit a microbus carrying workers. The truck then crashed into a house and a cafe on the desert highway near the entrance of Shurafa village in Minya, Health Ministry's spokesman Khaled Megahed said.

He added that 18 ambulances rushed to the scene and moved the victims to nearby morgues and hospitals, noting that three out of the 28 wounded people received treatment and were discharged.

Egypt suffers a high rate of traffic accidents that kill thousands of people every year.

Earlier in July, at least 10 people were killed and 25 wounded in a truck-bus collision on a highway in Matrouh coastal province northern Egypt.

Traffic accidents in Egypt declined by 24.5 percent in 2017 to 11,100 cases compared with 2016, according to the country's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, leaving 3,700 people dead and 14,000 injured.

Human errors are responsible for about 80 percent of road accidents in the most populous Arab country, while vehicle technical problems and external factors, like bad weather and poor road lights, come next.?