A total of 38 people were killed in a massive weekend rockslide in Egypt which flattened homes in a north Cairo shantytown, the latest toll given by the health ministry yesterday showed.
“The number of victims has risen to 38 dead and 57 wounded,” the ministry said in a statement carried by the official MENA news agency.
Giant boulders crushed dozens of homes in the shantytown of Manshiyet Nasser in Saturday’s landslide, burying whole families under the rubble.
Television reports suggested that as many as 500 people could be missing as rescuers continued in a desperate race to find survivors of the tragedy, which occurred in the first week of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.
After an emergency meeting on Saturday, Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said there would be a full review of housing settlements built throughout the country without construction permits.
Workers cut through a railway embankment on Sunday to bring heavy earth-moving equipment to the site of the rock fall.
Egyptian rescue workers attacked the roof of one collapsed building with sledgehammers in an attempt to reach the floor below.
Residents of one street moved furniture outside and packed up other belongings on instructions from the authorities, who they said plan to demolish the building and others nearby.
But no heavy equipment such as bulldozers, loaders or cranes had reached the site in eastern Cairo by Sunday afternoon, about 30 hours after giant rocks peeled off the nearby cliff and tumbled down on to the houses and people below.
Some of the rocks weigh more than 200 tonnes and it could take days to break them up and lift them out of the way.
The government set up a tented camp in a public garden several kilometers away for survivors from about 100 families whose houses were destroyed or damaged.
Other residents said they had spent the night in the street and that the government had not provided food or shelter.
The cliff, part of the Muqattam Hills which flank the old city of Cairo on the eastern side, fell on one of the poor working-class areas which have sprung up around Cairo as the city grew in the last few decades.
Rockfalls have been frequent in the area and the authorities had moved some people to new houses elsewhere.
Egyptian media said some people refused to move on the grounds that the alternative houses were too far away. But some residents said they did not believe the new houses existed or thought that one needed to pay a bribe to obtain one.
“We only saw these homes on television. Where are they?” said Nimah Abdel Tawab, an elderly woman.
“The people with money took these homes. Everything in our country is for money,” Mohamed Hassan said.
The disaster was the latest in a series of events which have damaged the reputation of an Egyptian government that has been in office with few changes since 2004.
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