Egyptian army storms Cairo mosque
EGYPTIAN security forces used teargas and live ammunition to storm a mosque in Cairo last night in which up to 1 000 Muslim Brotherhood protesters had barricaded themselves, as the military’s ruthless crackdown intensified.
Dramatic footage from inside the al-Fatah Mosque in Ramses Square showed Brotherhood members fighting for breath as troops fired in canisters of teargas, filling the hall of worship with clouds of white smoke.
Outside, troops who had besieged the mosque exchanged fire with gunmen who were using its minaret as a sniper point.
The siege was one of numerous flashpoints across the country yesterday as Egypt’s generals continued to defy international condemnation of their actions. Hundreds of lives have been lost during one of the bloodiest weeks in the country’s recent history.
In other developments on another dramatic day in Egypt:
The government threatened to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood altogether;
Officials said the death toll from Friday’s “day of rage” protests was 173, on top of 638 killed during violence earlier in the week;
The Muslim Brotherhood said the son of its spiritual leader had been killed;
Video footage showed a protester being shot in the stomach as he staged a “Tiananmen Square” style protest in front of a tank;
Egyptian authorities arrested Mohammed al-Zawahri, the brother of the al-Qaeda chief, Ayman al-Zawahri, for supporting the Islamists.
Yesterday’s siege began when large numbers of Muslim Brotherhood supporters took refuge overnight in the alFatah mosque, already the scene of at least 35 deaths on Friday. The mosque’s precincts had been turned into a makeshift mortuary, with dozens of corpses bearing bullet wounds to the head and chest.
By daybreak, troops had sealed off the roads around the mosque with tanks and barbed wire. For a few hours, efforts were made to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the standoff.
But the protesters, who had barricaded themselves in with piles of furniture, refused to leave, fearing not just arrest but beatings by anti-Brotherhood mobs who had gathered outside.
Armed with sticks and metal rods, the thugs, who some suspected of being drafted in by the government, were attacking men with beards, women in Islamic headscarves, and anyone else suspected of being a Muslim Brotherhood supporter, as well as foreign journalists.
In an attempt to avoid another round of serious bloodshed, the army sent in soldiers to negotiate with the protesters, but with little success.
Ahmed Emara, whose father Saad Emara was inside the mosque negotiating for an evacuation, gave an account of what had gone on inside.
“Army officers initially told my father that the people besieged in the mosque would be taken for investigation by the military prosecution,” he said.
When that offer was rejected, he claimed the army had promised that if the occupiers agreed to leave peacefully, they would be given safe passage from the mosque and then released.
“The evacuation had started in groups of five, then they heard shooting sounds,” Ahmed Emara said.
A gunman stationed in the mosque’s minaret had opened fire at the army and into the crowds gathered outside.
“They said that one of the protesters ascended the minaret and shot at
The evacuation had started in groups of five, then they heard shooting sounds
them,” he said. “But the gate to the minaret was controlled by the army, and there was no way that the protesters could go up.”
At one point, soldiers formed a human corridor for the mosque’s occupants to leave through, shouting to the hostile crowd outside: “Don’t attack these people. If you do it will be an insult to the army.”
However, as the first people appeared at the door of the mosque, the crowd surged forward. The army was forced to fire shots in the air to keep them at bay. Among those who had been trapped inside the mosque were four Irish children of Hussein Halawa, the imam of Dublin’s biggest mosque.
Omaima Halawa, 21, who was with her two sisters Somalia, 27, and Fatima, 23, as well as their younger brother Ibrihim, 17, sought refuge in the mosque after Friday’s protests and spoke to the Irish national broadcaster RTE from inside.
“We are surrounded in the mosque both inside and outside,” she said. “The security forces broke in and threw teargas at us.”
Elsewhere in Egypt, at least 10 people were killed by security forces and dozens injured in the canal city of Suez when they gathered to protest in defiance of the curfew. —© The Sunday Telegraph, London