CAIRO — Massive boulders crashed down on a shantytown on the outskirts of Cairo on Saturday, killing at least 24 people and burying many more under tons of rubble, Egyptian authorities said.
Frantic residents in the sprawling Manshiyet Nasr slum were digging by hand and trying to lift huge rocks to reach any survivors. Haidar Baghdadi, the parliamentarian for the region, told Al-Jazeera television that buried residents were calling for help using their cellphones.
At least eight boulders, some the size of small houses, peeled away from the Muqattam cliffs and buried about 50 homes in the slum, one of many densely populated shantytowns ringing the city of 17 million.
Manshiyet Nasr is home to 1.2 million people, Baghdadi said.
A security official said 35 people were injured and many more might be buried under hundreds of tons of rock. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
“My whole family is underneath the rock,” sobbed Anwar Ragab as he watched a body being pulled from under the rock. “I don’t know what to do, I can’t do anything — I just want my children back.”
By nightfall, no heavy equipment was being used to clear debris. A single bulldozer sat stranded because it couldn’t move through the slum’s narrow streets, and authorities planned to demolish some buildings to clear the way.
The collapse occurred in the early morning when most residents were sleeping, having awoken earlier to eat ahead of the daytime fast for Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.
“It was as if a knife sliced the cliff into pieces,” said 27-year-old resident Sayyed Rashad.
The area was covered by a thick layer of dust and the scene was chaotic as men and women screamed in grief and blamed the government for a slow rescue operation.
After sundown, residents broke their daily fast amid the ruins. Most rescue efforts appeared to stop until cries for help from under the rubble prompted some to start digging again.
Slums such as Manshiyet Nasr at the base of the Muqattam cliffs are filled with migrants from the countryside looking for work in Cairo, which suffers from a severe housing shortage. Buildings on top of the cliffs and below are crudely built and lack basic services, contributing to the instability of the vast plateau.
There are periodic rock slides on the edges of the brittle Muqattam hills. In 2002, 27 people were killed in another rock slide in the same area, Baghdadi said.
