Three women died and another 4 injured in the coastal city of Alexandria Sunday after their three-storey building collapsed, civil defence officials have confirmed. "The old building fell to rubble in the early hours of Sunday as a woman and her daughter and their neighbour were buried under the debris," the officials were quoted by the Middle East News Agency (MENA) as saying. They added that there is a possibility that more bodies could be buried under the rubble of the old house, in the Karmouz area of Alexandria. "The civil defence troops are working around the clock to try to help the trapped and recover the bodies," Alexandria Governor Adel Labib said while touring the wrecked site. He added that the house was given an evacuation decree four years ago. "However, the inhabitants defied the decree and stayed there," he said. Penalties against construction cowboys were boosted in 1996, shortly after the collapse of a building in the upmarket Cairo neighbourhood of Heliopolis which left 64 people dead. Just before the 1992 earthquake that killed 500 people in Cairo, the government Al-Ahram newspaper reported that 40 percent of homes in the Egyptian capital were threatened with collapse.