Massive fire at Telecom Egypt building kills 4, injures over two dozen

Egyptian officials said Tuesday a fire that engulfed a main telecom company building in downtown Cairo a day earlier left four people dead and over two dozen injured.

The large blaze, which broke out at the landmark 10-story Telecom Egypt building and lasted for hours, began in one of the halls on the floor housing telecom operators and spread to other floors due to its intensity, authorities said.

The four dead were company employees who had been inside the burning building, according to their workers union.

A total of 27 people had been hospitalized as of Tuesday afternoon, the health ministry said in an update, although some have since been discharged. The ministry confirmed that four bodies were recovered from the site.

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Some people who suffered smoke inhalation received treatment on site and didn’t require emergency transfers to hospitals. They were not included in the figures released by the health ministry.

On Tuesday morning, the upper part of the building was charred, and firefighters were still spraying water as smoke billowed from the top floors, though the massive flames had been contained, according to an AP photographer on site.

The blaze prompted a temporary outage of internet and mobile phone services. NetBlocks, a global internet monitor, wrote Monday on X that network data show national connectivity was at 62% of ordinary levels.

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The outage also disrupted air traffic, but the civil aviation ministry said early Tuesday all halted flights have taken off.

The Egyptian Stock Exchange halted trading on Tuesday due to widespread disruption impacting the efficiency of the trading system.

The minister of communications, Amr Talaat, said in a statement that all communications services will gradually be restored within 24 hours and that they were transferred to more than one switchboard to operate as an alternative network.