Flats in Alexandria crumble reviving allegations of shoddy construction work and building violations in Egypt

This article is more than 7 years old

This article is more than 7 years old

An eight-storey apartment block in Alexandria collapsed on Wednesday, killing at least 23 people and injuring 11 in the second deadly accident to hit Egypt in two days, according to officials.

Mohammed el-Sharqawy, a health ministry official, said rescue teams were searching for survivors under the rubble. Military police from a naval base cordoned off the area to help the rescue work.

The building collapse came a day after 19 police conscripts were killed just outside Cairo when their train carriage jumped the tracks and smashed into another train.

It was not immediately clear what caused the building collapse. The block was in a poor district of Alexandria. Violations of building specifications have been blamed for similar accidents in the past.

Mohammed Abbas Atta, the governor of Alexandria, told Egypt's official news agency that the building had been constructed without a permit.

Abul-Ezz el-Hariri, an opposition politician from Alexandria, warned that hundreds of buildings in the city faced a similar ending, but that lax law enforcement following the ousting two years ago of Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, meant that no action was being taken against building violations.

Residents complain that landowners in farmland on the city's outskirts took advantage of the chaos and near lawlessness that followed the former president's overthrow and illegally sold plots to developers who then built shoddy apartment blocks.

Similar violations have taken place across much of the country. Pointing to the magnitude of the problem, the housing minister, Tareq Wafeeqm, told reporters that 318,000 illegal constructions had been erected in 23 of Egypt's 27 provinces between 2009 and 2012.

Alexandria's security chief, Major General Abdel-Mawgood Lutfi, said that the building that collapsed had been put up five years ago and that it had 24 apartments.

As it had fallen early in the day most of the tenants had been inside. Police evacuated residents of two adjacent buildings for fear of structural damage.

The collapse could stoke criticism of the Mohamed Morsi administration. Critics accuse the government of failing to carry out reforms and overhaul the nation's deteriorating public services.

Two months ago, 50 children died when a train rammed into their school bus in southern Egypt. That tragedy also sparked a storm of criticism of Morsi, who took office in June.

The latest train wreck led to protests on Tuesday at railway stations in Cairo, Alexandria and a third city in the Nile delta. The demonstrators were protesting at what they said was official negligence in maintaining and upgrading the country's aging rail network.

Morsi's government blamed Tuesday's train accident on allegedly 30 years of corruption and misrule under Mubarak.

The transport minister, Hatem Abdel-Lateef, told another news conference that overhauling the country's railways would cost $2.3bn, a hefty sum for a nation reeling from two years of political and economic turmoil.

On Wednesday Morsi's administration sought to defuse the mounting criticism, declaring solidarity with the victims of the train wreck and the building collapse.

A spokesman, Yasser Ali, said the presidency offered its condolences to the victims' families and pledged to ensure that they and the survivors received the best available care.

Morsi, the nation's first democratically elected president, has struggled since taking office in June to address a host of problems including the ailing economy, tenuous security, a slumping tourism industry, and seemingly endless political turmoil.