Egyptians on Monday voiced outrage over reports that firefighters and paramedics took more than an hour to respond to a blaze that tore through a Coptic Christian church and killed 41 people.
Grief has spread over Sunday’s fire among Copts, the Middle East’s largest Christian community, which makes up at least 10 million of Muslim-majority Egypt’s population of 103 million.
Many other Egyptians have also voiced outrage over the disaster in the scorched Abu Sifin church, located in the greater Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba west of the Nile.
Photo: AP
As debate flared on social media, one Twitter user wrote that the reportedly slow response time “is not just negligence, it’s complicity.”
“My cousin’s children died,” Moha El Harra said in a widely shared online livestream after Sunday’s blaze, which was blamed on an electrical fault. “I’m from the area. I know that the ambulance could have been there in three minutes. It took them an hour and a half.”
“All we want is justice — for the local ambulance authority, the fire services, civil defense. All of them need to be held to account,” she said.
Acting Minister of Health and Population Khaled Abdel Ghaffar on Sunday said that “paramedics were informed of the fire at 8:57am” and the first ambulance “arrived at the site at exactly 8:59am.”
Many challenged this, with eyewitnesses saying it took “an hour and a half” for emergency services to arrive.
“No, the ambulance did not arrive within two minutes,” one local resident, Mina Masry, said.
“If the ambulance had come on time, they could have rescued people,” he said, adding that many lives were lost to smoke inhalation, not burns.
A statement from the public prosecutor’s office confirmed that asphyxiation caused all of the 41 deaths as the corpses bore “no other visible injuries.”
Another witness, Sayed Tawfik, said that as the inferno raged, some panicked people inside “threw themselves out of windows to escape the fire.”
He pointed to a vehicle parked on the street with a deep indentation, which he said was “left by a person who is now lying in the hospital with a broken arm and back.”
Residents said bystanders braved flames and smoke to save children from the burning building.
“Everyone was carrying kids out of the building,” said Ahmed Reda Baioumy, who lives next to the church. “But the fire was getting bigger and you could only go in once or you would asphyxiate.”
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed