(MENAFN- The Peninsula) At least 17 people were killed and three were still under the rubble when a residential building in Egypt's capital collapsed overnight, emergency services said yesterday.
The owners had illegally added two additional floors to the seven-storey building in the poor Matariya district in the east of the city. "Seventeen people have been killed, eight injured and three are still under the rubble according to their relatives," Cairo's emergency services head General Mamduh Abdelkader said. He said investigators were still investigating the cause of the collapse but that illegal construction work was suspected.
"We don't yet know the cause of the accident but we have been told that two storeys were recently added totally illegally," Abdelkader said. Witnesses said rescuers working to clear the debris were struggling to manoeuvre their equipment in a very narrow alleyway.
Relatives of the missing and onlookers were digging with their bare hands in the rubble. A woman who said her brother died in the collapse charged that the building was so unsafe she had refused to enter it.
Residents both of the building and the neighbourhood said of construction work and two floors added illegally. Mohammed Al Bishlawy, district prosecutor for eastern Cairo, said he has opened an inquiry and asked for the arrest of the building's owner. He blamed the accident on "renovation work in a second-floor apartment that has affected the structure of the building and the addition of two floors without permission".
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