Anger flares at slow response to deadly Cairo church fire
Egyptians voiced outrage yesterday over reports that firefighters and paramedics took over an hour to respond to a blaze that tore through a Coptic Christian church and killed 41 people.
Grief has spread over Sunday's fire among Copts, the Middle East's largest Christian community, which makes up at least 10 million of Muslim-majority Egypt's population of 103 million.
But many other Egyptians have also voiced outrage over the disaster in the now scorched Abu Sifin church, located in the greater Cairo neighbourhood of Imbaba west of the Nile River.
As debate flared on social media, one Twitter user charged that the reportedly slow response time "is not just negligence, it's complicity".
"My cousin's children died," video creator Moha El Harra said in a widely shared online livestream after Sunday's blaze, which was blamed on an electrical fault.
"I'm from the area. I know that the ambulance could have been there in three minutes. It took them an hour and a half.
"All we want is justice -- for the local ambulance authority, the fire services, civil defence. All of them need to be held to account."
Health Minister Khaled Abd el-Ghaffar had declared Sunday that "paramedics were informed of the fire at 8:57 am" and the first ambulance "arrived at the site at exactly 8:59 am".
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