Egypt: Funeral services were held for 41 people who died in a massive fire at a Coptic Christian church and worshipers were forced to leap from windows at two Cairo churches on Sunday evening.
The Abu Siffin Church was damaged by the fire, which was attributed to an electrical fault. Imbaba, a working-class neighborhood west of the Nile and a part of Giza Governorate in greater Cairo, is densely populated.

According to Agence France-Presse correspondents, hundreds of people gathered to pay tribute in and around two churches in Giza, where pastors prayed for the victims.

Father Abdel-Christ Bekhit, a priest of the church, was one of the coffins who reached for him among a crowd of weeping mourners.

Before emergency services could douse the fire, Egypt's Coptic Church and the Ministry of Health reported that there had been 41 deaths and 14 injuries.

According to eyewitnesses to the fire that broke out on Sunday morning, people rushed to the multi-storey house of worship to rescue those trapped, but rescuers were soon overcome by the heat and deadly smoke.

Egypt's 103 million-majority Muslim country has at least 10 million Copts, making them the largest Christian group in the Middle East.

Ahmed Reda Baomi, who lives next to the church, said everyone was pulling the children out of the building. However, the fire continued to grow and you could only enter once before dying of suffocation.

A separate witness, Syed Tawfiq, said that "some people threw themselves out of the windows to escape the fire." He pointed to a dented car that was "built by a man who is currently lying in the hospital with a broken arm and back."

According to local resident Meena Masri, emergency services responded slowly. It took "about an hour" for the fire trucks to arrive, and the ambulances "more than an hour", despite being five minutes away from their station.

Massery added, "If the ambulance had arrived on time, it could have saved the people.
According to a statement from the Public Prosecutor's Office, the deaths were caused by suffocation because "there were no visible injuries."

The fire broke out in an air conditioner on the second floor of the church building, which also houses social services, according to the interior ministry statement about the findings of the forensic investigation.
According to Father Farid Fahmi of another church nearby, the fire broke out due to a short circuit.

He told that he was running the generator due to power failure. "When the power came back there was an overload."

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced on his Facebook page in the morning that he had "mobilized all state services" in response. In a later statement, he claimed to have "offered his condolences by phone" to Pope Tavadros II of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

According to a statement from the Presidency, he also directed the Armed Forces Engineering Authority to "handle the reconstruction and renovation" of the church.

Christian communities often lament over the long delays and bureaucratic hurdles that occur when churches are rebuilt after devastating fires.

Giza's governor ordered "immediate assistance of £50,000 (about USD 2,600) for the families of the dead and £10,000 for the wounded."

The most important Muslim institution in Egypt, al-Azhar, sent its grand imam condolences for the "tragic accident" and reaffirmed "the readiness of al-Azhar hospitals to receive the injured".

The families of the victims received the "deepest condolences" of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement from his office.
Fires often happen accidentally in Cairo, a sprawling metropolis where millions of people live in shanties.

Egypt has recently experienced several fatal fires due to its infrastructure, which is often old and poorly maintained.
The Arab nation, the most populous nation in North Africa, has experienced attacks against its minority Copts, who have also complained of discrimination there.

Copts have been the target of deadly attacks by Islamist militants, with churches, schools and homes set on fire, particularly after Sisi overthrew former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

The Copts also lament their exclusion from important government positions and criticize the restrictive laws governing the construction and renovation of churches.

In February, Sisi appointed the first Copt judge to head the Supreme Constitutional Court, the country's highest court. Sisi was the first Egyptian president to attend the Coptic Christmas Mass every year.

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