A mother and her two daughters were killed on Monday evening as a one-story building collapsed in the Amreya area of Alexandria.

Investigators under the supervision of Major General Khaled Ghoraba, the Alexandria security chief, said that only a woman and her two daughters were living inside the house.

Civil Protection Department recovered two bodies and are still looking for the third under the rubble.

Last week, an 11-story apartment building collapsed in the working-class neighborhood of Gomrok in Alexandria. The collapse caused three neighboring buildings to also fall in, claiming a total of 19 lives.

Building collapses are not uncommon in the country, where building violations or bad maintenance have caused disasters over the years in informal settlements, poor neighborhoods and rural areas.

In February this year, 12 died in Damietta when an old residential building housing a Wasat Party office collapsed. At least five died in Kafr al-Dawar, Beheira, in June, when a four-story building fell.

At least 11 people were killed in Alexandria in 2008 when a four-story building collapsed as residents slept.

The 2008 incident in Alexandria came a month after a massive rock slide buried a neighborhood at the foot of a cliff in Cairo, killing more than 100 people.

Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm