Grief turns to search for justice in deadly Cairo building collapse

The Cairo district of Hadayek Al Qubba, where a building collapsed on Monday morning killing 13 people including eight children, was quiet on Tuesday as the area mourned the loss of neighbours and friends.

Police were stationed at the entrance of Nasr Heresh alley, a narrow street in the large district’s lower-income section where the building collapsed, discouraging passers-by from taking photographs of the site or loitering.

All adjacent buildings were evacuated, leaving the alley void of activity as heaps of debris waits to be moved by municipal workers.

Passages from the Quran could be heard filtering through the windows of a number of homes as residents' thoughts began to move from mourning to justice.

“God help those in need and punish those responsible,” Hassan Hamed, 67, a contractor and resident of a parallel alley in the area, told The National.

“Everyone is talking about this one resident on the first floor of the building who was fixing up his house and caused the collapse. Neighbours told him to stop multiple times but he didn’t.”

Mr Hamed was referring to a man in custody who police say knocked down one of his walls to make way for an American-style kitchen.

The collapsed building was built in 1980, according to a statement from Cairo’s governor on Monday.

The 1970s and 80s were a time when demand for housing increased dramatically in light of more Egyptians from rural provinces moving to the capital in search of better prospects.

“I was living in Cairo in the 1980s and I remember builders were doing a lot to cut costs," Mr Hamed said. "At the time, we got cement from government outlets at reduced prices. Many people would buy the cement, use half of it to build their project and then sell the rest on the black market.

“Buildings are falling all over the country all the time and they usually date back to this period of construction. That’s why there are buildings around here that were built in the 1910s and 20s that are still standing today.”

Mr Hamed said the fault with these incidents lay with lax regulation from the government but bad behaviour from people also played a role.

However, the collapsed building had been built without government permission, Hossam El Din Fawzy, deputy governor of Cairo’s northern sector, told journalist Lamis El Hadidy during a television phone-in.

It had been issued a renovation notice by the local government in 1992, Mr Fawzy said, but the order was ignored.

The procedure usually starts with a renovation notice, followed by demolition of dangerous parts, then a full demolition if owners don’t take action to renovate, he explained.

However, Mr Hamed said these orders from the municipal government are rarely executed.

“A lot of these people that receive these notices don’t have two pennies to put together to do what the government is asking and even if they had some money saved on the side, where would they go for however long it took to renovate? They have jobs and live around here. So most of them just pray to God and hope for the best,” Mr Hamed said.

Since the start of the year, 18 buildings have collapsed in Egypt, six in the past 20 days, killing 30 people, data from Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics showed.

A census taken in 2017 showed nearly 98,000 buildings were at risk of collapse.