Sayyida Aisha Bridge: a failure easier to blame on the jinn

On February 13, 1984, Cairo Governor Youssef Sabri Abu Taleb announced that only seven accidents had occurred on the Sayyida Aisha Bridge that month, a figure he described as “a significant drop” compared to previous months. That same day, a car had plunged from the bridge. His deputy, Ahmed Hassan Abdel Rahman, blamed reckless drivers who ignored safety regulations, dismissing an urban myth that the accidents were the vengeance of the dead whose graves had been removed to make way for the bridge.

The bridge, built in 1979 as part of Salah Salem Road and passing over the cemetery of Sidi Jalal and Sayyida Aisha Square—home to the area’s historic mosque—gained notoriety throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As accidents persisted, so did a half-serious, half-joking belief that the structure was cursed. According to local microbus drivers, the engineer who designed the bridge was paralyzed as punishment for disturbing the dead.

Echoes of this urban legend resurfaced in early April 2024, by which point there had already been 15 accidents that year. Cairo Governor Ibrahim Saber announced plans to dismantle the bridge within three months, as part of ongoing efforts to “develop” the historic square.

This decision marked more than routine urban renewal. It signaled the end of a 46-year nightmare for generations of Cairenes who had come to know the structure as the “Bridge of Death.”

No records

While rumors of design flaws abound, concrete information on the bridge’s construction are in short supply. Neither Cairo Governorate, which Al Manassa contacted during its investigation, nor the Khalifa district, where the square is located, could provide official documentation.

However, during a casual conversation, a district employee offered a clue. “As far as I know, the engineer who designed the bridge in the mid-1970s later became the minister of transport,” he said.

That lead took Al Manassa to the Egyptian Press Archive, which hosts decades of reporting on the bridge, its accidents, statements from governors, deputies, and traffic officials.

One report published by the state-owned Al-Gomhuria quoted Governor Abu Taleb following the Feb. 1984 crash, reiterating the drop in accidents. South Cairo traffic police chief Col. Hassan Ismail added that the bridge’s sharp curve posed a design flaw.

Almost 20 years later, in a Nov. 8, 2002 report headlined “When will the blood stop flowing on Sayyida Aisha bridge?” journalist Nagah Seif concluded “A former transportation minister designed the bridge twenty years ago when he was a junior engineer. Why doesn’t he admit now, having left office, that he made a mistake and call for it to be knocked down and rebuilt?”

The bridge was opened in 1979, meaning that “former ministers” who served prior to Seif’s article were Suleiman Metwally (May 1980 - Oct. 1999) and Ibrahim El-Demery (Oct. 1999 - Feb. 2002). Which one designed the bridge?

The answer emerged in a June 3, 1995 interview published by Al-Wafd newspaper, in which the then deputy dean of the Faculty of Engineering - Ain Shams University was Ibrahim El-Demery, who identified himself as the bridge’s original designer. He explained that it was one of Cairo’s first generation of overpasses, alongside Fustat and El-Malek El-Saleh bridges, with planning beginning in late 1976.

El-Demery stated that the project was funded by a Belgian government grant, with Egypt responsible for preliminary planning. “Belgium prepared the final blueprints and sent prefabricated steel parts for rapid assembly,” he said, claiming the bridge was completed in just two weeks.

Everyone at fault—except the top official

In news reports from the 1980s through the early 2000s, transportation experts consistently cited serious design and construction flaws behind the bridge’s deadly record, with one year alone witnessing 255 accidents. A 2002 article from Akhbar Al-Youm quoted bridge design consultant Mohamed Shoaib of Ain Shams University, who identified three “fatal errors”: the tight bend for vehicles coming from Old Cairo meant a risk of understeering and falling off; the structure invited speeding; and the barriers were too low given the risks.

The 350-meter long, 16-meter wide bridge curves unusually sharp. This is due to the narrowness of Salah Salem Road in this historic area, where demolishing the surrounding archaeological buildings was unthinkable at the time.

However, El-Demery, in his interview with Al-Wafd, spoke about the “constraints that shaped the bridge’s current form.” These included Sayyida Aisha mosque on one side and the ancient wall of Magra El-Oyoun aqueduct on the other. This forced the initial design to give the bridge a turning radius of 150 meters, given that the Antiquities Authority refused to remove any parts of Magra El-Oyoun.

El-Demery further echoed the blame assigned two decades earlier by Deputy Governor Abdel Rahman to reckless drivers. “We studied the causes of the accidents,” El-Demery said. “They all involved lorries, trucks, and buses. The primary reason was driver behavior and not observing the speed limit.”

People versus heritage

El-Demery went on to serve twice as transportation minister. His first term (1999 - 2002) under Prime Minister Atef Ebeid ended in resignation after the 2002 Upper Egypt train fire that killed over 361 people. Yet, he returned in 2013 under Hazem el-Beblawi following President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster. That November, a train collided with a truck and a minibus in Dahshur, killing 27. Despite the tragedy, El-Demery remained in office until June 2014.

Throughout the bridge’s 46-year history, public calls for its dismantling were driven not only by safety concerns but also by its impact on the historic landscape.

One such call came in an Aug. 8, 2008 Rose al-Youssef article citing a study from the Ministry of Culture’s Organization for Urban Harmony recommending dismantling due to the bridge’s intrusion on views of nearby Islamic monuments—including Sayyida Aisha, Masih Pasha, and Al-Ghouri mosques, the remains of the Sultaniyya Mausoleum, Qaytbay Minaret, and the Citadel of Salah Al-Din.

Ahmed Abdel Moaty, a professor of road engineering at Cairo University, proposed dismantling the bridge and constructing a tunnel in its place, as noted in the report “When will the blood stop flowing on Sayyida Aisha bridge?” referenced above. In the meantime, he advocated for stricter traffic enforcement.

Perhaps the most striking proposal came from Col. Hassan Ismail in Al-Gomhuria on February 15, 1984 where he called for the government to expropriate nearby land to expand and straighten the bridge—a plan the reporter punctuated with two exclamation marks, noting the area’s many heritage sites made such demolition unacceptable at the time.

Sayyida Aisha Bridge was spared for decades at the cost of many lives. The surrounding monuments also remained unscathed. El-Demery’s controversial legacy endured, until Governor Ibrahim Saber, a decade after El-Demery’s departure from public life, finally informed the public of what many had long suspected: “The problem lies in the bridge’s original design.”