CAIRO —
Egyptians voiced outrage Monday over
reports that firefighters and paramedics took over an hour to respond to a
blaze that tore through a Coptic Christian church and killed 41 people.
اضافة اعلان
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.
But many other Egyptians have also voiced outrage
over the disaster in the now scorched Abu Sifin church, located in the greater
Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba west of the Nile River.
As debate flared on social media, one Twitter user
charged that the reportedly slow response time “is not just negligence, it’s
complicity”.
“My cousin’s children died,” video creator 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.”
Smoke inhalation
Health Minister Khaled Abd
El-Ghaffar had declared Sunday that “paramedics were informed of the fire at 8:57am”
and the first ambulance “arrived at the site at exactly 8:59am”.
But many challenged this, with eye-witnesses 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, told AFP. “If the ambulance had come
on time, they could have rescued people,” he added, stressing 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 local 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 car 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.”
Slow response times of emergency services are not
unusual in Egypt, where neighborhood residents routinely improvise rescue
efforts, even within the megalopolis of
Cairo.
Smoke detectors and alarms and fire escapes are rare
and in many areas, such as Imbaba, warrens of narrow roads make it hard for
fire engines to reach disaster sites.
Baioumy, the neighbor, told AFP that firefighters
were hampered by the church’s location “on a very narrow street”.
Egypt, with its informal residential areas and often
dilapidated infrastructure, has suffered several deadly fires in recent years.
Most recently, a church went up in flames a week ago
in the eastern Cairo district of Heliopolis, though no deaths or injuries were
reported.
Because the Coptic church fire happened during
Sunday mass, when local families flock to the church and its daycare services,
children were among the victims.
Though officials have not confirmed how many minors
died, AFP correspondents at the funeral Sunday night saw several child-sized
coffins.
Local media published a list from the Imbaba
Hospital listing the names of 10 people killed who were aged under 16.
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