By Michel Cousins and Mathieu Galtier.
Tripoli, 10 may 2013:
Part of a house collapsed in downtown Tripoli early this morning killing five . . .[restrict]of its 17 occupants. The roof of the corner section of the three-story building fell onto the floor below bringing it down and crushing to death three people asleep in the room underneath it and then crashing to the ground floor, killing the young couple there.
“I heard a noise like a bomb at around 6.00 am. At first, I thought it was the sound of a weapon, as it happens often in Libya. Then I understood it was the roof of the building in front of mine which collapsed”, Sunds, a neighbour, said.
The dead have been named by neighbours at Hafed Al-Bilal and his 8-month pregnant wife Asma and, on the first floor Najat Sabie, her 21-year old daughter Randa and 13-year old son Rawan. Her husband, Iyyad Tarhouni, survived with a broken arm. He and another survivor also injured were taken to Shara Zawia Hospital.
The family living in the top floor flat survived. According to a neighbour, the son, who was sleeping in the corner room, woke up hearing a loud crack and fled the room as the ceiling came down.
The outer walls of the Italian-era house, in Shara Derna off Shara Omar Muktar, are still standing but the inside is open from the ground to the skies. Among the rubble In the middle of the rubble, there is a mattress with a large blood stain on it.
In the street lie the belongings of the residents – smashed furniture, blankets, curtains, clothes and another blood-stained mattress. When asked the names of those who died, a neighbour went into her house and returned with one of the victims’ trousers, covered in dust, and pulled out his wallet and identity card to get the full name.
Some 50 local residents blocked Shara Omar Mukhtar, blaming the government for the tragedy and demanding that the Prime Minister himself come and visit the site. They claimed that many of the building in the area were in dangerous condition, that the government should have done something about them and that it should have rehoused people. Shouting “Down with Zeidan”, they threatened that if no one from the government came to Shara Derna, they will take their protest to the Prime Minister’s office.
They also say that although the police and emergency service arrived on the scene, they did nothing to help rescue the victims and that was left to neighbours to pull people out of the rubble.
“I saw a fireman who did nothing whereas the people were trying to rescue the victims,” a neighbor told the Libya Herald.
Many houses in the area, built by the Italians in the 1920s, are in poor condition, with no maintenance carried out for decades. Several, with leaning walls and large cracks look as if they could collapse at any moment.
The tragedy highlights the lack of planning controls.
Some new buildings have gone up but locals say that they have destabilised existing structures and that nothing was done about it. In other instances, extra storeys have been added to existing buildings without permission.
Qaddafi’s Law No. 4 under which houses and apartments was seized from their original owners and handed to the occupants is also being blamed for the tragedy.
About 16,000 people live in the area, most of them not the original owners, but have no title to the properties. As a result they have done little or no maintenance, viewing it as the responsibility of the authorities.
Some neighbours, though, refused to put all the blame to the present government. One said : “The government has just received the budget. They will do something for sure. But it is still a young government. It needs time.”
“We sent a report to explain the issue of the obsolete buildings in our area to the authorities during Abdul-Jalil’s time and Al Kib’s. We sent it to the Prime Minister’s office, to the Ministries of Social Affairs and of Housing and to Tripoli Local Council. But we had no answer at all”, Mahmoud Salah Zintani, a member of the local Bekhair area council, complained.
“There are new hotels in Belkhair. Maybe, but I am not sure, these new buildings have weakened the old ones. Anyway, I want Zeidan’s governement to come here to see by their eyes, and not only by reports, how people are leaving”, Zintani said.
Mahmoud Ramadan Ben Juma, a member of Tripoli Local Council, was in Derna Street to check the situation. “We transferred the report to government at the end of 2012. We can’t do anything because we dont have the budget. But, we know the danger. The government has to take emergency measures. We are not asking the impossible!”
Khaled Al Greo, owner of the nearby Four Season hotel in Shara Omar Mukhtar, called for the government to evacuate the area. “What happened this morning has to be taken seriously. The problem is all governments have been too slow to act.”
Local resident Salah Al-Marjani has already made up his mind. He has decided to remove his family far away from the district. “We have cousins elsewhere in Tripoli. We will go there. We want to move from Belkhair definitively.”
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