Dozens of police and rescue workers were sent to the scene, backed up by fire engines, ambulances and sniffer dogs, but locals were enraged at what they saw as an inadequate government response to the disaster.

Witnesses described hundreds of weeping, yelling residents and neighbours gathered around the cordoned-off site, cursing local authorities and saying they had relatives and friends trapped beneath the rubble.

"You've just got your hands in your pockets, you're not doing anything!" one man yelled at police standing nearby. "If it were the shura council (the upper house of parliament), you'd have had the army in by now!" shouted another.

"It was horror. The power went out, we heard a loud bang like an earthquake, and I thought this house had collapsed. I went out, I saw the whole mountain had collapsed," said Hassan Ibrahim Hassan, 80, whose house escaped the destruction.

One six-storey building was reduced to rubble by the landslide, witnesses said.

The shanty town of red brick houses and unpaved narrow alleys is famously overcrowded, with entire poor families sometimes crowded into a single room. Its buildings were all huddled at the base of cliffs next to a main Cairo highway.

A woman in a white veil was screaming, "My children, my children! I didn't get anyone out, I need to see them, even if they're dead!"

Rescue efforts were moving slowly, and equipment for digging out survivors had not yet reached the site. State news agency MENA said authorities had requisitioned heavy lifting equipment.

Much of the digging was being done by relatives and neighbours tugging at piles of rocks and debris by hand in their searching for survivors or bodies, and rescue workers were using pickaxes to break up large rocks.

Many residents said they had reported a small rockslide to local authorities weeks ago, but accounts differed as to the outcome of the incident.

One resident, who gave her name only as Umm Mohamed, showed a Reuters correspondent damage to her house from the earlier rockslide. The walls were severely cracked and leaking, and clouds of dust rose from the walls when struck.

"If you had children, would you want them to live here? No one paid any attention to us," said Umm Mohamed.

When fire broke out in Egypt's upper house of parliament in August, killing one person, the military were called out to battle the blaze with helicopters. (Writing by Aziz El-Kaissouni; editing by Tim Pearce)