CAIRO — The children had gathered with their parents in a dilapidated church in a working-class neighborhood in Cairo, where Sunday services were a weekly ritual for many of the city’s Coptic community. But before the service was over, a fire had broken out and raged through the church, killing dozens, including 18 children – three of them from one family.
All of the children killed in the blaze that killed 41 people on Sunday at Abu Sefein, a Coptic Orthodox church in Cairo’s Embaba district, were between the ages of 5 and 13, said Father Moussa Ibrahim, a church spokesman.
Salwa Sadek, a member of Cairo’s Coptic community, said she once taught three of the deceased children at a kindergarten in another church: an eight-year-old girl, her five-year-old brother and another eight-year-old. boy.
“I couldn’t believe this was really happening,” said a distraught Ms. Sadek.
The fire, which Father Ibrahim said was caused by an electrical generator used in the church, and the death toll, were devastating blows to Egypt’s Coptic minority, who have long lamented being downgraded to second-class citizenship.
On Sunday night, the Coptic community struggled with the enormity of the tragedy; there were so many casualties that funerals, long processions of wailing mourners next to white coffins, had to be held on Sundays in two separate churches.
“The situation is very difficult,” said Father Daoud Ibrahim, another Coptic priest who led more than 17 funerals at the Church of the Virgin Mary and Archangel Michael in the nearby al-Warraq neighborhood. “In situations like this, you don’t know what to do.”
The discrimination faced by the Copts includes government restrictions on the construction, renovation and repair of churches that have left many of their places of worship, such as Abu Sefein Church, in disrepair.
Father Ibrahim, the spokesman for the Abu Sefein Church, said the fire was started by an electrical generator used in the building, which also houses classrooms and a nursery. He said he was unable to provide further details about the blaze while investigating the fire. It was not immediately clear where the children had died, but witnesses said they rescued some children from the floor above the church, where the nursery and classrooms were located.
The fire broke out as worshipers gathered for mass in the small building, where the generator was in use after the power went out. When power came back on, witnesses said, the generator, followed by an air-conditioning unit, exploded, sparking a fire that ripped through the four-story church, causing a rush of churchgoers.
Most of the deaths and injuries were the result of smoke inhalation and the stampede, The Egyptian Ministry of Health said:.
The tragedy also raised questions in a country whose government has long been criticized for its lax security standards and poor oversight. The country’s chief prosecutor, Hamada el-Sawy, said he ordered an investigation into the blaze.
Father Ibrahim, whose Church of the Virgin Mary and Archangel Michael was the site of a 2013 wedding party drive-by shooting, said those who died in the fire are now considered martyrs.
“They came to pray,” he said. He said they were going to make sacrifices to God, “and they became the sacrifices.”
Nada Rashwan contributed from Cairo.
