Egypt in flames
Hundreds die in crackdown over power struggle
CAIRO: Egypt’s health ministry said 278 people had been killed in nationwide violence yesterday as police cracked down on loyalists of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi.
The largest toll was at the Rabaa al-Adawiya protest camp here, where a correspondent counted 124 bodies. By contrast, health ministry spokesman Mohammed Fathallah said 61 people had died there.
Fathallah said 21 people died at the Nahda Square camp here, 18 in Helwan, south of the capital, and the rest in several provinces. Forty-three members of the police force had been killed, he said.
While bodies wrapped in carpets were carried to a makeshift morgue near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque, the army-backed rulers declared a one-month state of emergency, restoring to the military the unfettered power it had wielded for decades before the pro-democracy uprising in 2011.
Thousands of supporters of Mursi had been camping at two major sites here since before July 3, the day the army ousted him as president. When Mursi was toppled, they vowed not leave the streets until he was returned to power.
With the assault yesterday, the authorities ended the sixweek stand-off with a show of state force that defied international pleas for restraint.
Violence spread beyond Cairo, with Mursi supporters and security forces clashing in the cities of Alexandria, Minya, Assiut, Fayoum and Suez, and in Buhayra and Beni Suef provinces.
The bloodshed also in effect ends the open political role of the Brotherhood, with the harshest crackdown yet on a movement that survived underground for 85 years to emerge after the 2011 uprising and win every election held since.
Security officials said senior Brotherhood figures Mohamed El-Beltagi and Essam El-Erian had been arrested, joining Mursi and other Brotherhood leaders in jail. Beltagi’s 17-year-old daughter was among the dead.
Before he was arrested, Beltagi warned of wider conflict, and singled out the head of the armed forces who deposed Mursi.
“I swear by God that if you stay in your homes, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will embroil this country so that it becomes Syria. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will push this nation to a civil war so that he escapes the gallows.”
In a rare sign of unease among the Brotherhood’s opponents, Mohamed ElBaradei quit as vice-president in the armybacked government, saying the conflict could have been resolved by peaceful means.
“The beneficiaries of what happened today are those who call for violence and terrorism, and the most extreme groups,” he said.
But his political movement, the anti-Islamist National Salvation Front, declared: “Egypt has held its head high in the sky, announcing victory over political groups that abuse religion.”
Although the security forces had twice before killed scores of protesters in attempting to drive Mursi’s followers off the streets, they had held back from a full-scale assault on the tented camp where supporters and their families were living behind makeshift barricades.
After the assault on the camp began, protesters recited Qur’anic verses and screamed “God help us! God help us!” while helicopters hovered overhead and armoured bulldozers ploughed over their makeshift defences. Masked police, armed with sticks and tear gas canisters, tore down tents and set them ablaze.
“They smashed through our walls. Police and soldiers, they fired tear gas at children,” said Saleh Abdulaziz, 39, a secondary school teacher clutching a bleeding wound on his head.
The government insists people in the camp were armed. Several television stations, controlled by the state or its sympathisers, ran footage of what appeared to be Mursi supporters firing rifles at soldiers from behind sandbag barricades. Western journalists have not seen such incidents. The crowds seemed armed mainly with sticks and stones.