Cairo:
Eight people were killed and three were injured on Tuesday when a six-storey residential building collapsed in central Cairo, Egypt's health ministry said.
Nine ambulances were sent to the scene as rescuers worked to “lift debris and search for injured people or bodies,” Health Ministry spokesman Hossam Abdel Ghaffar said in a statement.
“I woke up to the sound of a huge explosion,” Waleed Mohamed, 38, told AFP near the scene of the rubble.
He said he and his fellow neighbors “ran to the building and saw it collapse, the gas line explode and everything destroyed,” he said.
According to district head Ahmed Awad, a restoration order had been issued in 1993 for the building, which was built in the 1960s in Cairo's lower-middle-income neighborhood of Al-Waili, the state-run newspaper Al-Ahram reported.
But “the residents of the building had appealed the order and it was not implemented,” the official said.
Neighboring buildings were evacuated on Tuesday as a precaution, according to a statement from the Cairo governorate.
A large number of buildings in central Cairo have not been restored since their construction in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In Greater Cairo – a sprawling metropolis with more than 26 million inhabitants – a number of fatal building collapses have occurred in recent years, both due to the poor condition of some buildings and sometimes due to failure to comply with building regulations.
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