CAIRO, May 26 – A court sentenced a Cairo deputy governor on Wednesday to five years in jail for negligence that led to a rockslide that killed 119 people in a shanty town, the official news agency MENA reported.
The Cairo criminal court also handed three year sentences to seven municipal workers over the September 2008 disaster, when massive boulders that peeled off from a limestone cliff buried an entire street in the Manshiyet Nasser slum.
The tragedy took place in the early morning as the victims slept.
The deputy governor, Mahmud Yassin, was allowed to post 5,000 pounds (883 dollars) bail until an appeal court reviewed the verdict. Bail was set at 3,000 pounds for the others.
The court "punished the accused in light of what was proven, that they committed the crimes of accidentally killing and injuring the victims," the agency reported.
The court found that Yassin and the others ignored studies warning that waste seepage could cause the cliff to collapse and that the residents should be moved to a safe distance.
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