Critics said the authorities had focused blame mostly on lower level officials for the disaster that triggered complaints from Egyptians who said the government was failing to protect the poor. One in five Egyptians lives on less than $1 a day.

"The court has ruled in favor of punishing Mahmoud Yassin, deputy governor of Cairo, with five years of hard labor ... on charges of manslaughter and unintentional damage," Judge Khaled Mahgoub said in his ruling.

Yassin, who was not present at the hearing, can appeal the verdict after paying bail worth 5,000 Egyptian pounds ($880).

The seven municipal officials received three years in prison in connection with the rockslide in September 2008, when huge boulders crushed ramshackle dwellings in Duwaiqa, a poor area on the eastern outskirts of Cairo.

At the time, local residents estimated there were up to 600 bodies that were never recovered.

Some Cairo neighborhoods have a population density of 100,000 people per square mile, packed into informal settlements without basic services.

The defense team plans on appealing against the ruling, lawyers Samir El Dably and Magdy Rashad said.

"Sentences of five and three years are very light and do not indicate a genuine desire to curb negligence and corruption in Egypt," said Hassan Nafaa, a political science professor at Cairo University and frequent critic of the government.

Rights groups said the state had done too little to move the poor from precarious places such as Duwaiqa.

Nafaa said the verdict appeared aimed at deflecting public anger but had placed blame mainly on lower ranking officials and "would not result in any deep change or in improvement of service provision."

Egypt's economy has grown strongly in the past decade, expanding at 7 percent a year before the financial crisis, but the poor complain that benefits are not trickling down. Rural Egyptians flock to Cairo for jobs, many settling in shantytowns.