By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 9, 2008

CAIRO, Sept. 8 -- Residents pounded riot police with fists and stones Monday outside an illegal slum crushed by a massive rockslide three days earlier. Egypt's Interior Ministry said rescue workers had recovered 41 bodies, but residents said they thought hundreds remained buried.

The residents of Manshiyet Nasr have expressed anger at the slow pace of rescue efforts since a cliff weakened by raw sewage and wastewater from an illegal settlement at its top collapsed Saturday morning, sending limestone boulders onto their houses and apartment buildings.

Egypt's government has said that at least 35 buildings were buried but has not released a list of the missing. Residents told the pro-government al-Ahram daily of a family of 20 killed in one home alone.

On the day of the collapse, Arab satellite channels broadcast chaotic scenes of screaming survivors trying to move the house-size boulders with bare hands. The coverage included a prominent Egyptian journalist demanding the resignation of Cairo's provincial governor. Authorities banned journalists and residents from the scene the next day.

Soldiers and other official personnel appeared to be leading the search Monday.

Although gated communities with million-dollar homes are mushrooming on Cairo's outskirts, the city's poor face a chronic shortage of affordable housing. Half of the more than 16 million people in Cairo are estimated to live in illegally constructed buildings without access to government services such as water and sewage treatment.

Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif released a statement Saturday faulting those who choose to live in illegal housing but later promised about $1,000 to each family made homeless by the rockslide.

Egypt has had a series of disasters over the past five years with high death tolls, and Egyptians complain about a lack of accountability regarding safety standards and emergency responses.

In July, an Egyptian court acquitted the owner of a ferry line in a ferry sinking in the Red Sea in 2006 that left 1,000 people dead. The owner was a member of President Hosni Mubarak's ruling party and had been appointed by Mubarak to parliament.