Landslide kills 30 in Cairo

An Egyptian man sits on the rubble of homes at the site of a massive rock slide off Moqattam hill in northern Cairo on Sept 6.

CAIRO // At least 30 people were killed and 46 injured when a massive rockslide buried a shanty town in Cairo today, with the death toll expected to rise, security sources said. Dozens of houses in the Manshiyet Nasser shanty town east of central Cairo were completely destroyed by boulders and rocks, the sources said. Police have cordoned off the area. Massive boulders, some 30 metres high, destroyed entire buildings. One six-storey building was completely reduced to rubble by the impact of the landslide, witnesses said.

"It was horror. The power went out, we heard a loud bang like an earthquake, and I thought this house had collapsed. I went out, I saw the whole mountain had collapsed," said Hassan Ibrahim Hassan, 80, whose house escaped the destruction. The shanty town is famously overcrowded, with entire poor families sometimes crowded into single rooms. Its buildings were all huddled at the base of cliffs next to a main Cairo motorway.

Dozens of police and rescue workers were sent to the scene, with fire engines, ambulances and sniffer dogs, but locals were enraged at what they saw as an inadequate government response. Witnesses described hundreds of weeping and screaming family members and neighbours gathered around the site of the destruction, cursing local authorities and saying they had relatives and friends trapped beneath the rubble.

"You've just got your hands in your pockets, you're not doing anything!" one man yelled at police standing nearby. Another added, "If it were the shoura council (Egypt's upper house of parliament), you'd have had the army in by now!" A fire in Egypt's upper house of parliament in August in which one person died saw the military called out to battle the blaze with helicopters. Rescue efforts were proceeding slowly, and equipment for digging out survivors has not yet been deployed at the site. Much of the digging is being done by relatives and neighbours searching for survivors or bodies by hand under the piles of rock and debris.

A Reuters eyewitness said police had brought in sniffer dogs to look for people trapped under the tons of rubble. *Reuters and AP