Four children, a woman killed in Qena building collapse

CAIRO – 13 August 2018: Five people, including a woman and four children, were killed after a three-story building collapsed on Monday morning in Upper Egypt’s Qena.

Five dead bodies were pulled out from the collapsed building, and the civil defense forces are still searching for more victims.

The dead bodies belong to a 35-year-old woman and children at the ages of 5, 9, 11, and 15.

On April 4, three people were killed and three others were injured after their building collapsed in Alexandria.

Egypt has a total of 13, 441, 680 buildings, 10, 111, 607 of which do not need to be repaired, while 3, 231, 852 buildings need to be overhauled, and 97,609 buildings need to be demolished, stated a report released in February by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Communities.

MP Yousry el-Moghazy, deputy head of the Parliamentarian Housing Committee, said that according to the statistics of the local development department, there are 90,000 buildings about to fall down, representing 15 percent of the total number of buildings in Egypt.

Since January 2015, the ministry has launched a campaign to remove violations that had been detected by the government on the Nile banks. As per the ministry’s latest data announced on Tuesday, a total of 26,322 encroachment violations on the Nile banks have been removed. Since March 2017, a total of 12,425 cases of encroachment have been removed, according to the data.