“Everyone was taking children out of the building,” Ahmed Reda Bayoumi, who lives near the mosque, told AFP. “But the fire kept getting bigger and more people died from smoke inhalation.” The Egyptian Coptic Church and the Ministry of Health said 41 people died and 14 were injured in the fire.
“It has been ensured that all the necessary measures for the rescue operation have been taken.”- Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced on his Facebook page in the morning. He later said he had sent his condolences to Coptic Pope Tawadros II by phone. The Home Ministry later said that “forensic evidence indicates that the fire started in the air-conditioning unit on the second floor of the church building.”
Father Farid Fahmi of another nearby mosque in Imbaba told AFP that the cause of the fire was a short circuit. “The power went out and they were using a generator,” he said, “and when the power came back on, it caused an overload and caused a fire.”
Copts are the largest Christian community in the Middle East, and at least 10 million of Egypt’s 103 million people belong to the Coptic sect. Egypt is the most populous North African country in the Arab world.
Since Sisi ousted former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, there have been deadly attacks by Islamist militants on Copts, destroying mosques, schools and homes.
It was big news that Sisi, the Egyptian president who attends the Coptic Christmas Mass every year, recently appointed the first Coptic judge to head the Constitutional Court.
Incidents of fires in large buildings in Egypt are a continuing story. In March 2021, a fire at a textile factory in the eastern suburbs of Cairo killed 20 people. In 2020, 14 Covid-19 patients died in two hospital building fires.
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