At least 14 people were killed, most of them policemen and firefighters, when a blazing 12-storey tower block collapsed on emergency services in a Cairo suburb, police said on Tuesday.
Rescue workers pulled out the bodies of four policemen, eight firefighters and two civilians from the building which collapsed during a fire late on Monday in the suburb of Medinat Nasser, police said.
Rescue teams had accounted for all the missing policemen and firefighters but could not rule out that civilians may still be under the rubble, though most had been evacuated just 45 minutes before the building disintegrated on Monday evening.
One of the civilians, Ramadan Farid Abul Futuh, who suffered bruises to the head, told reporters that around 9pm local time.
”I was inside the building, I heard an explosion then I lost consciousness. I found myself in the hospital,” he told reporters.
Abdel Sabir Abdel Rashid, who works in an appliance store where the fire broke out, told reporters: ”We saw flames in the store, we tried to put out the fire before the firefighters arrived but I couldn’t breathe because of the thick smoke and I was taken to the hospital.”
”Residents were spared a catastrophe as the building had been entirely evacuated. God was very kind,” said Local Development Minister Mustafa Abdel Kader.
At least 36 people were also injured in the blaze and collapse, 26 of them civilians. Only 12 needed hospital treatment, police said.
Eye-witnesses said the fire appeared to have started in a cellar storing inflammable materials, including aerosols. Police said the blaze caused several explosions, believed to have been caused by gas canisters.
Cracks appeared in two neighbouring buildings which had to be evacuated during the night, according to police.
The appartment block, in the middle-class residential district, also housed shops and a popular restaurant on the ground floor, Cairo governor Abdel Rahim Chehata, who visited the area overnight, said the block, erected in 1981, collapsed because normal building rules had not been observed.
Egypt’s official Mena news agency said seven storeys had been added to the permitted original five floors, without authorisation.
One resident told Housing Minister Ibrahim Suleiman at the scene of the inferno that she and other tenants had lodged an official complaint against the building’s owner just six days earlier after he had carried out some alterations.
Collapses are a frequent occurrence in Egypt, where many buildings are put up without authorization or normal checks and others have simply fallen into neglect.
”Who will take responsibility for these shameful catastrophes,” demanded an editorial in Tuesday’s government evening newspaper Al-Ahram Al-Massai. ”This catastrophe is due to negligence.”
It added that such collapses were the ”natural consequence of corruption in the building domain where people close their eyes to glaring violations of building regulations.”
Seven people died in a building collapse in the capital last May, while ten people were killed and 19 injured in February last year as two apartment blocks collapsed in poor districts of the Egyptian capital. – Sapa-AFP