Egypt
seethes under curfew after hundreds killed
Security
forces struggled to clamp a lid on Egypt on Thursday after hundreds
of people were killed when authorities forcibly broke up camps of
supporters protesting the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi,
in the worst nationwide bloodshed in decades.
14
August, 2013
Islamists
clashed with police and troops who used bulldozers, teargas and live
fire on Wednesday to clear out two Cairo sit-ins that had become a
hub of Muslim Brotherhood resistance to the military after it deposed
Mursi on July 3.
The
clashes spread quickly, and a health ministry official said about 300
people were killed and more than 2,000 injured in fighting in Cairo,
Alexandria and numerous towns and cities around the mostly Muslim
nation of 84 million.
The
crackdown defied Western appeals for restraint and a peaceful,
negotiated settlement to Egypt's political stand-off, prompting
international statements of dismay and condemnation.
The
Muslim Brotherhood said the true death toll was far higher, with a
spokesman saying 2,000 people had been killed in a "massacre."
It was impossible to verify the figures independently given the
extent of the violence.
The
military-installed government declared a month-long state of
emergency and imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew on Cairo and 10 other
provinces, restoring to the army powers of arrest and indefinite
detention it held for decades until the fall of autocrat Hosni
Mubarak in a 2011 popular uprising.
The
army insists it does not seek power and acted in response to mass
demonstrations calling for Mursi's removal.
Vice
President Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who lent
liberal political support to the ousting of Egypt's first freely
elected president, resigned in dismay at the use force instead of a
negotiated end to the six-week stand-off.
"It
has become difficult for me to continue bearing responsibility for
decisions that I do not agree with and whose consequences I fear. I
cannot bear the responsibility for one drop of blood," ElBaradei
said.
Other
liberals and technocrats in the interim government did not follow
suit. Interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi spoke in a televised
address of a "difficult day for Egypt" but said the
government had no choice but to order the crackdown to prevent
anarchy spreading.
"We
found that matters had reached a point that no self-respecting state
could accept," he said.
CHURCHES
TARGETED
Islamists
staged revenge attacks on Christian targets in several areas,
torching churches, homes and business after Coptic Pope Tawadros gave
his blessing to the military takeover that ousted Mursi, security
sources and state media said.
Churches
were attacked in the Nile Valley towns of Minya, Sohag and Assiut,
where Christians escaped across the roof into a neighboring building
after a mob surrounded and hurled bricks at their place of worship,
state news agency MENA said.
The
United States, the European Union, the United Nations and fellow
Muslim power Turkey condemned the violence and called for the lifting
of the state of emergency and an inclusive political solution to
Egypt's crisis.
An
EU envoy involved in mediation efforts that collapsed last week said
the authorities had spurned a plan for staged confidence-building
measures that could have led to a political solution.
The
Brotherhood publicly rejected any plan that did not involve Mursi's
restoration to office. An Egyptian military source said the army did
not believe the Islamists would eventually agree to a deal and felt
they were only stringing the diplomats along to gain time.
In
Cairo, police and soldiers aided by self-styled "popular
committees" of civilian vigilantes armed with clubs and machetes
enforced the curfew, searching cars and checking identity cards of
people passing through makeshift checkpoints made of tires and
concrete blocks.
Despite
the lockdown, hundreds of Mursi supporters tried to gather at El Iman
mosque in the Cairo neighborhood of Nasr City in an attempt to start
a new sit-in to replace the main camp dispersed at nearby Rabaa
al-Adawiya square, MENA reported.
They
chanted "down, down, military rule" and "police are
thugs," a Reuters witness said.
The
protesters converted part of the mosque into a field hospital to tend
to the wounded from the other sit-in, it said.
"They
killed us, those coup makers and their thugs. Help us people, help
us!" shouted Magda Ali, a woman marcher who was forced to leave
the Rabaa camp.
Egyptian
state television broadcast aerial footage of the burning remains of
sprawling tent cities, as well as images of handmade guns it said
were found at the sites. It also showed some video of alleged armed
protesters shooting at police.
Reuters
witnesses saw no protesters armed with more than bricks, stones and
sticks as black-clad central security police in riot gear poured out
of vans firing teargas and snipers fired from rooftops.
"DEPLORABLE"
Interior
Minister Mohamed Ibrahim told a news conference 43 members of the
police force were killed in the clashes.
He
vowed to restore Mubarak-era security after announcing, in a
statement last month that chilled human rights campaigners, the
return of notorious political police departments that had been
scrapped after the 2011 revolution.
Wednesday's
death toll took the number of people killed in political violence
since Mursi's fall to about 600, mostly Islamist supporters of the
ousted president.
Violence
rippled out from 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.
U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry called the bloodshed in Egypt
"deplorable" - a word U.S. diplomats rarely use - and urged
all sides to seek a political solution.
A
U.S. official told Reuters that Washington was considering cancelling
a major joint military exercise with Egypt, due this year, after the
latest violence, in what would be a direct snub to the Egyptian armed
forces.
The
"Bright Star" exercise has been a cornerstone of
U.S.-Egyptian military relations and began in 1981 after the Camp
David peace accords between Egypt and Israel. The United States has
already halted delivery of four F-16 fighter jets in a signal of its
displeasure.
Islamist
militants with no direct link to the Brotherhood have staged almost
daily attacks on security forces in the lawless Sinai Peninsula
bordering Israel since Mursi's fall.
In
the latest violence, gunmen shot dead two policemen outside their
station in El Arish in northern Sinai on Wednesday evening, MENA
reported.
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