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Woman rescued from rubble
25/12/2007 16:09 - (SA)
Alexandria - Egyptian rescue workers on Tuesday pulled a young woman from the rubble of a block of flats that collapsed in the port city of Alexandria as the death toll from the disaster rose to 10.
Yasmin Mohamed Abdel Aal, 24, was pulled from the debris of the 12-storey-building "in good condition" although about 15 other people are still thought to be trapped after Monday's collapse.
"She is in good condition, she can move and speak, and is now undergoing X-rays on different parts of her body," Alexandria hospital doctor Mahmud al-Damati told the official MENA news agency.
Abdel Aal had been staying in the ill-fated building with relatives for the Muslim Eid holiday season after marrying two months ago and moving to the United Arab Emirates, her brother Sherif said.
MENA said three people were injured in the collapse of the building in the Loran district of Alexandria, Egypt's second city and main seaport with around four million inhabitants.
A security source said two more bodies were pulled from the rubble on Tuesday, bringing the death toll to 10 as emergency workers continued their search using sledge hammers and circular saws. Many structures unauthorised
The collapse was the latest in a string of such disasters in recent years in Egypt, where many structures are unauthorised and built in breach of regulations or with poor materials.
Penalties against construction cowboys were boosted in 1996, shortly after the collapse of a building in the upmarket Cairo neighbourhood of Heliopolis left 64 people dead.
The Loran building was home to between 40 and 50 people, but the accident happened in the morning after many residents had left for work or school.
Local authorities had ordered the removal of the building's top two floors in 1995 because they contravened building laws but the order was not implemented.
The area remained cordoned off on Tuesday, as anxious relatives clung on to hope that their loved ones would still be pulled alive from the devastated area in the Mediterranean city.
Rescue workers picked through the rubble, carefully heaving aside pieces of concrete and mangled steel among the satellite dishes usually found on Egyptian rooftops that had been brought tumbling down.
The official MENA news agency said army equipment was being used to try and find the dead and survivors. No construction permit
A housing official was quoted by MENA as saying that the building was erected 25 years ago without a construction permit.
Alexandria governor Adel Labib said some workers had been renovating the first floor when the building suddenly tilted to one side and then collapsed.
Labib ordered the two buildings on either side of the ruin to be evacuated after they also partially collapsed.
Prosecutor Abdel Meguid Mahmoud on Monday issued an arrest warrant for the building owners and for the estate agent in charge of restoration work as part of an investigation to determine the cause of the collapse.
The owners of the building had been ordered several times in the past and as late as 2002 to renovate the dilapidated building but work was repeatedly delayed due to "conflicts" with residents, a statement said.
Two people were killed in May in the Cairo working class district of Sayyeda Zeinab when an old building collapsed as workers were restoring it.
In October 2006, seven people were killed when a four-storey building collapsed in the Nile delta city of Mansura.
Just before a 1992 earthquake that killed 500 people in Cairo, the government Al-Ahram newspaper reported that 40 percent of homes in the Egyptian capital were threatened with collapse.
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