After 41 killed at Abu Sefein, ‘systematic’ reasons behind the church’s vulnerability to fire, experts say

The fire that swept through Abu Sefein Church in Imbaba on Sunday took the lives of 41 people, 18 of them children, while 14 others were injured due to smoke inhalation and a stampede, propelled as the morning’s churchgoers jostled to escape through narrow doors, ill-equipped to facilitate emergency exit to the alleyways of the Giza neighborhood outside.

With officials and news reports pointing to the malfunction of an electricity generator, clips circulating of the presiding minister, later killed in the fire, proceeding with the service even as smoke billows out behind him, and claims circulating on social media that ambulances were late to arrive to the scene, Sunday’s tragedy has raised questions about the inadequacy of fire safety standards and the provision of services to churches nationwide as a function of discrimination against the country’s Coptic minority. 

Mada Masr spoke to a former senior civil defense official and to a researcher specializing in Coptic affairs who described the systemic obstacles that make church buildings nationwide vulnerable to fatal incidents like Sunday’s.

The account of the accident was related in detail by Health Minister Khaled Abdel Ghaffar when he visited survivors of the fire on Sunday. He said that the fire broke out at 9 am when an electricity generator malfunctioned as power was restored after an outage. “There was a lot of wood near the site, which resulted in a large amount of smoke, especially since the building is four floors high,” he added.

A statement by the Interior Ministry said an electrical fault caused an air conditioning unit on the second floor to catch fire.

In its statement, the Health Ministry later attributed the 41 deaths to asphyxiation and to a stampede as the congregation attempted to leave the building, while news reports later showed 18 of the deceased to have been children.

The church didn’t have sufficient emergency exits to allow for worshipers to be evacuated safely, said Major General Mamdouh Abdel Qader, former assistant to the interior minister for the Civil Protection Authority and former head of the authority for Cairo. Qader told Mada Masr that under the fire-fighting code, any buildings designed for assembling large numbers of people — hospitals, schools, factories and the like — must install early warning devices for fires, an automatic fire-fighting system, and emergency exits.

And it’s common, according to religious freedoms researcher Ishaq Ibrahim, to find safety considerations absent at most churches in Egypt, since most buildings that serve as churches were not designed to host congregations of people. Up until six years ago, “with the adoption of the first law for building and renovating churches in 2016, it was almost impossible to build a church,” Ibrahim told Mada Masr. 

“It became customary instead for Christian worshippers to purchase a residential building, a factory or a company, and convert it informally to a church, later reconciling its status with legal authorities over time," he added.

Imbaba’s Abu Sefein Church is one of those self-built buildings later converted to act as a church, according to Michael Antoun, representative for the Coptic Orthodox denomination on the Cabinet committee and tasked with legalizing the status of existing churches. The church was previously a four-story residential building in a narrow alley in the Imbaba neighborhood, and only when it was turned into a church were a nursery and a classroom attached to it.

To qualify for licensing as a church under the 2016 law, the buildings were meant to meet a number of criteria, with a committee formed to check if it met regulations that include the building's structural integrity, Ibrahim said. “Out of 5,540 churches that submitted their papers to the competent authorities, by April 2022, only 2,401 churches and affiliated buildings have been approved since the start of the committee’s work.”

A number of public figures from the Coptic community took to social media to criticize both the state and religious authorities’ response to the Abu Sefein Church fire, including filmmaker Basel Ramsis, who declared that “the state must immediately halt all the bureaucratic and administrative procedures that disrupt and delay the maintenance of churches.”

Condolences to the victims were offered by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who directed “all concerned state agencies and institutions to immediately take all necessary measures to deal with this incident and its effects,” while authorities began an investigation of the scene.  

Families of the deceased are to receive up to LE100,000, the Social Solidarity Ministry announced, while each person injured will receive up to LE20,000.

Ahmed Medhat contributed writing to this report.