Bloodiest day in decades in Egypt as scores shot dead

Clashes between security forces and supporters of Egypt's ousted President Mohamed Morsi resulted in the deaths of 235 people across the country today, the state news agency MENA has said.

The report quoted Mohamed Sultan, head of Egypt’s emergency services, as saying another 2,001 people were wounded in clashes that broke out after security forces broke up two pro-Morsi vigils in Cairo.

A Health Ministry official confirmed the 235 figure to Reuters and said it included both police and protesters.

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A poster of deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi reads “Yes to legitimacy” amid flames as riot police clear Rabaa Adawiya square in Cairo of members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi supporters today. Photograph: Reuters

Egyptian security forces had earlier crushed a protest camp of thousands of supporters of the deposed president, shooting dead scores of people in the bloodiest day in decades in the Arab world’s most populous country.

The health ministry had said 149 people were killed, both in Cairo and in clashes that broke out elsewhere in the country. Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood said the death toll was far higher in what it described as a "massacre".

Egypt’s interior minister claimed 43 policemen were killed in the clashes, which would raise the overall death toll today to above 190.

Mohammed Ibrahim, who is in charge of the police, said Morsi’s supporters stormed 21 police stations and damaged or torched seven churches across the country. He said they also stormed the Finance Ministry in Cairo and occupied its ground floor.

While dead 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 wielded for decades before a pro-democracy uprising in 2011.

Thousands of Morsi’s supporters had been camped at two major sites in Cairo since before he was toppled on July 3rd, and had vowed not leave the streets until he was returned to power.

With the assault, the authorities ended the six-week stand-off with a show of state force that defied international pleas for restraint. Egypt is the strategic heart of the Middle East, striding the Suez Canal and with a peace treaty with Israel.

Violence spread beyond Cairo, with Morsi 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 effectively ends the open political role of the Brotherhood, with the harshest-ever crackdown 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 were arrested, joining Morsi himself and other Brotherhood leaders in jail. Beltagi’s 17-year-old daughter was among the dead.

Mass protests

Before he was arrested, Beltagi warned of wider conflict, and singled out the head of the armed forces who deposed Morsi on July 3rd following mass protests.

“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 from among the Brotherhood’s opponents, Mohamed ElBaradei, 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,” he said.

But his own political movement, the anti-Islamist National Salvation Front, showed no such qualms, declaring “Egypt has held its head high in the sky announcing victory over political groups that abuse religion”.

Since Morsi was toppled, the security forces had twice before killed scores of protesters in attempts to drive Morsi’s followers off the streets. But they had held back from a full-scale 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 Koranic verse and screamed “God help us! God help us!” while helicopters hovered overhead and armoured bulldozers ploughed over their makeshift defences.

Reuters journalists on the scene saw masked police in dark uniforms pour out of police vans with sticks and tear gas bombs. They 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.

After shooting with live ammunition began, wounded and dead lay on the streets near 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 war-zone field hospital.

Seven dead bodies were lined up in the street, one of a teenager whose skull was smashed, with blood pouring from the back of his head.

At another location in Cairo, a Reuters reporter was in a crowd of Morsi supporters when he heard bullets whizzing past and hitting walls. The crowd dived to the ground for cover. A man was killed by a bullet to the head.

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-Morsi protesters firing rifles at soldiers from behind sandbag barricades.

However, Reuters journalists and other western media have not witnessed such incidents. Crowds appeared to be armed mainly with sticks, stones and slabs of concrete against rifle-wielding police and troops.

The violence was the worst Egypt has suffered since war with Israel in 1973, and reveals security forces prepared to take the sort of action against street protesters that they demurred from when the public rose up against autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

It forces tough decisions for Egypt’s western allies, especially Washington, which funds Egypt‘s military with $1.3 billion (€1 billion) a year and has so far refused to label the army’s overthrow of Mursi a “coup”.

Among the dead in Cairo were at least two journalists. A Reuters photographer was shot in the foot.

At a makeshift morgue at the camp field hospital, a Reuters reporter counted 29 bodies, with others still arriving. 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 with a roll of tissue.

Adli Mansour, the judge appointed president by the army when it overthrew Egypt’s first elected leader on July 3rd, announced a state of emergency for one month and called on the armed forces to help police enforce security. Rights activists said the move would give legal cover for the army to make arrests.

A curfew was imposed in Cairo, Alexandria and several provinces from 7pm to 6am.

Reuters