149 KILLED IN EGYPT’S SECURITY CRACKDOWN
Mursi supporters shot dead as army, police crush protest camp
CAIRO: Egyptian security forces have crushed a protest camp of thousands of supporters of deposed president Mohamed Mursi, shooting dead 149 people.
The health ministry said deaths took place in Cairo and in clashes that broke out elsewhere in the country. Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood said the death toll was far higher.
The army-backed rulers declared a one-month state of emergency, restoring to the military the unfettered power it wielded for decades before a pro-democracy uprising in 2011.
Mursi supporters and security forces clashing in Alexandria, Minya, Assiut, Fayoum and Suez and in Buhayra and Beni Suef provinces.
With the assault on the camps, the authorities have ended the six-week stand-off with a show of state force that defied international pleas for restraint.
The bloodshed effectively ends the open political role of the Brotherhood, which survived for 85 years as an underground movement before emerging from the shadows after the 2011 uprising to win every election held since.
Mohamed El Baradei, a former UN diplomat, quit his post of vice-president in the army-backed government, saying the conflict could have been resolved by peaceful means. “The beneficiaries of what happened today are those call for violence, terrorism and the most extreme groups.”
Since Mursi was toppled, the security forces had twice before killed scores of protesters in an attempt to drive Mursi’s followers off the streets. But they had held back from a fullscale assault on the tented camp where followers and their families have lived behind makeshift barricades.
After the assault on the camp began, desperate residents recited Qur’an verses and screamed “God help us! God help us!” while helicopters hovered and armoured bulldozers ploughed over makeshift defences.
Reuters journalists saw the police pour out of vans with sticks and teargas bombs. They tore down tents and set them ablaze.
After shooting with live ammunition began, wounded and dead lay on the streets in pools of blood. An area of the camp that had been a playground and art exhibit for the children of protesters was turned into a warzone field hospital.
Seven bodies were lined up in the street, one of a teenager whose skull had been smashed.
The government insists people in the camp were armed. Several television stations, all controlled by the state or its sympathisers, ran footage of what appeared to be pro-Mursi protesters firing rifles at soldiers from behind sandbag barricades.
Western media have, however, not witnessed such incidents. Crowds appeared to be armed mainly with sticks and stones against rifle-wielding police and troops.
At a makeshift morgue at the camp field hospital, a Reuters reporter counted 29 bodies. Most had died of gunshot wounds to the head.
A 12-year-old boy, bare-chested with tracksuit trousers, lay out in the corridor, a bullet wound through his neck. His mother was bent over him, rocking back and forth and silently kissing his chest. One of the nurses was sobbing on her hands and knees as she tried to mop up the blood.
Sky News cameraman Mick Deane and Dubai-based Gulf News reporter Habiba Ahmed Abd Elaziz were killed.
The violence forces tough decisions for Egypt’s Western allies, especially Washington, which funds Egypt’s military. Yesterday, the US condemned the use of violence against protesters and the return to a state of emergency.
Adli Mansour, the judge appointed president by the army when it overthrew Mursi on July 3, announced a one-month state of emergency and called on the armed forces to help the police enforce security. Rights activists said this would give legal cover for the army to make arrests.
A 7pm to 6am curfew was imposed in Cairo, Alexandria and several provinces.
Turkey urged the UN Security Council and Arab League to act. The EU and several of its member countries deplored the killings.