(MENAFN) Egyptians uttered anger on Monday due to statement which show that firefighters and paramedics needed more than an hour to turn off a fire which broke out through a Coptic Christian church and left 41 victims.
Sorrow spread over Sunday's fire among Copts, the Middle East's biggest Christian community, which makes up more than 10 million of Muslim-majority Egypt's population of 103 million.
But many other Egyptians have also expressed angriness over the disaster in the now burnt Abu Sifin church, located in the bigger Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba west of the Nile River.
As debate went viral on social media, one Twitter user charged that the allegedly slow response time "is not just negligence, it's complicity".
"My cousin's children died," video creator Moha El Harra announced in a widely shared online livestream after Sunday's disaster, which was because of 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."
Health Minister Khaled Abd el-Ghaffar said Sunday that "paramedics were informed of the fire at 8:57 am" and the first ambulance "arrived at the site at exactly 8:59 am".
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