A Cairo court Wednesday deferred until March 10 the trial of seven officials, including an assistant to the Governor of Cairo, accused of dereliction indifference and a lack of responsibility that caused the death of 119 people from a rockslide that hit a Cairo shanty town in 2008. "The hearings will resume on March 10, due to the absence of four defendants in the case," the court said. The judge then issued an attendance warrant for the defendants as well as the chief of the Executive Authority for the Urbanisation of Cairo. The Chief Prosecutor had referred Mahmoud Yassin, the assistant to the Cairo governor for the eastern zone, and eight other senior officials to trial for being behind the death of residents in Deweiqa, a randomly built locality in the Manshiyet Nasser area in September 2008. For years the shantytown grew in the shadow of a limestone cliff, its wooden shacks and shoddy brick apartment buildings creeping up and spreading over the hill. The whole time, the limestone was cracking inside, slowly and invisibly, from the slum's own sewage. In September 2008, the cliff finally gave way. It rained giant boulders onto the poorest of Egypt's poor, killing hundreds in the Deweiqa slum, with whole families still believed buried under the rubble. The residents of the slum area attended Wednesday's session and called on the authorities to provide them with alternative houses.
