Three people have been killed and six injured in a crash on a motorway in Upper Egypt, state news agency MENA reported.

A microbus and a truck collided late on Wednesday north of Minya, in the country's south, leaving three dead, including the drivers of both vehicles.

The accident, on the Cairo-Aswan Agriculture Road, occurred because of high-speed driving, a security official has said.

Six people, including a woman, were injured.

Traffic accidents, which the government's census agency says claim 18 lives a day, are commonplace in Egypt due to badly maintained roads and railways and poorly enforced traffic laws. Egyptians have often complained that successive governments have done little to uphold minimum safety standards to prevent highly frequent accidents.

In August, nineteen people were killed and 17 injured when two minibuses plunged into a canal near Egypt's tourist city of Luxor.

Earlier in the same month, at least 44 people died and dozens were injured when two buses collided in the southern part of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, near a popular Red Sea resort.

A recent government report said that 100,000 car accidents took place in Egypt from 2008 to 2012, with 33,000 killed and another 150,000 injured.