A CAIRO criminal court yesterday sentenced an assistant to the governor of Cairo to five years in prison, over the rockslide that killed 119 in a slum area in the Egyptian capital in 2008. Seven other officials were jailed for three years. "Mahmoud Yassin, the deputy governor for Cairo, was sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter. However, he should pay LE5,000 ($800) in lieu of serving his sentence," the court said yesterday. It added that Yasssin was indirectly responsible for the death of the 119 people who died in the Deweiqa landslide of September 2008. "Seven other officials from the Ministry of Housing and the Municipality of the suburb of Manshiyat Nasser received jail sentences of three years in jail. They can pay LE3,000 each to be spared the jail term," the court said. It added that the eight convicts lagged in warning residents of the area of the dangers of rockslides and forcing them to leave or providing them with alternative housing An entire street in Deweiqa, one of the Egyptian capital's poorest districts, disappeared beneath 15 metres of fallen boulders in the early morning hours on the day of the 2008 rockslide. Some rocks, weighing between 60 to 70 tonnes, fell on the village at the foot of the Muqattam hills, crushing some 50 homes. It was almost 24 hours before the real search for survivors began, said survivors. The Deweiqa district is home to thousands of Cairo's poorest people, many from the country, who live in crumbling, makeshift houses without even basic sanitation. As the population of the city has mushroomed, the suburbs have grown unchecked and there are now entire communities living in such precarious conditions, many of them beneath overhanging cliff edges.
