By RIA Novosti
Cairo : Egyptian rescuers have pulled out another 14 bodies from underneath the rubble of a residential building that collapsed in the port city of Alexandria on Monday, national media said on Wednesday.
At least ten people remain trapped in the debris of the 12-storey building, which caved in on Monday morning after the majority of residents had left for work.
On Tuesday, Egyptian rescuers pulled out a 24-year-old woman who had been buried beneath the rubble for about 24 hours, bringing the number of survivors to three.
The seven-storey residential building was built some 25 years ago without planning permission. The building’s owner later secured a permit, but then illegally added a further five floors to the apartment block. The building was recently declared to be unsafe, and had been scheduled for demolition.
The city’s mayor, Adel Labib, said that the owner of the building had recently started illegally reconstructing the ground floor, ignoring repeated orders to cease.
Safety violations have been the cause of numerous recent building collapses in Egypt. In November 2006, seven people died under the rubble of a collapsed four-storey building in the city of Mansura in northern Egypt. A year earlier, the illegal addition of three floors to a residential building in Alexandria left 19 dead.