Building collapses in Morocco’s Fez, 22 people dead
Emergency services look for people after the building collapse in Fez (via AFP)
At least 22 people were killed, and 16 were injured in a building collapse at Morocco’s historical city of Fez, authorities said, according to a Reuters report on December 10.
The prosecutor said that the death toll was provisional and an investigation into the tragedy is still ongoing. Two adjacent buildings in the Al-Mustaqbal neighbourhood collapsed, one of which was unoccupied, and the other was hosting an Aqiqah ceremony.
Eight families were occupying the building in which the traditional Muslim ceremony marking the birth of a child (Aqiqah) was taking place. Local authorities said that, besides a criminal investigation, technical and administrative inquiries have also been launched to find out why the four-storey buildings collapsed.
This building collapse is the worst to have occurred in Morocco’s history, but is one of many. Last February, five people lost their lives in Fez’s old city. Nearly a decade earlier, in 2016, two fatal building collapses occurred within a single week: one involved a house in Marrakech that killed two children, and the other was a four-storey building that left four people dead and injured around two dozen others.
The buildings were constructed in 2006 under a government programme aimed at improving housing for residents of Fez’s shantytowns. Under this scheme, families were given plots of land and were responsible for building their own homes, helping to replace informal settlements with more permanent housing.
The housing secretary of state, Adib Ben Ibrahim, said that in January this year, about 38,800 buildings in the Kingdom were classified as being at risk of collapse.
Some authorities attribute the weakening structural integrity of the building to the earthquakes in 2023.
Fez, one of the host cities for the 2030 World Cup and this month’s Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), also contains some of Morocco’s poorest neighbourhoods. The youth-led GenZ-212 protests were sparked by frustration over poor public infrastructure and services, and by anger at the government’s focus on World Cup preparations instead.
While most of the Moroccan population and industrial hubs are concentrated in the north-western region containing Casablanca, Rabat, and Tanger, the rest of the country is fairly agrarian, relying on agriculture, fisheries, and tourism, and has poorer infrastructure.
Reuters, Al Jazeera, Maghrebi.org, Le Monde
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