Egypt: 120 reported killed at Cairo rallies
Violence has broken out in Cairo where defiant supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi are protesting against his removal from power, with up to 120 people reported dead.
Doctors at an Islamist-run field hospital said another 1,000 had been injured in the clashes, which broke out shortly before pre-dawn prayers at a Cairo vigil staged by backers of Mr Morsi.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague condemned the killings. “I call on the Egyptian authorities to respect the right of peaceful protest, to cease the use of violence against protesters, including live fire, and to hold to account those responsible,” he said.
Gehad El-Haddad, a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman, said the army had opened fire on protesters who had spilled out of the vigil on to a main thoroughfare. The health ministry contested the figure of 120 killed – provided by the Muslim Brotherhood – issuing a lower death toll of 38. The state news agency MENA quoted an unnamed security source as saying only teargas was used to disperse demonstrators.
But Mr Haddad said the victims had suffered bullet wounds to their heads and chests.
“They are not shooting to wound, they are shooting to kill,” Mr Haddad said.
Reuters and AFP correspondents reported seeing dozens of bodies laid out on the floor of the field hospital.
The new wave of bloodshed came as hundreds of thousands of Egyptians heeded a call by army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to give him a popular mandate to confront violence unleashed by his July 3 overthrow of Egypt’s first freely elected president.
The Brotherhood mounted counter-demonstrations, swelling a month-long vigil in northern Cairo before violence erupted. A Reuters reporter saw heavy exchanges of gunfire in the early hours of yesterday between security forces and Morsi supporters, who tore up pavement concrete to lob at police.
Earlier in the day the MENA state news agency reported nine people killed in violence nationwide and at least 200 wounded.
Most of those deaths were in Egypt’s second city of Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast, where hundreds of people fought pitched battles, with birdshot fired and men on rooftops throwing stones at crowds below.
Several of those killed were stabbed, hospital officials said, and at least one was shot in the head.
News of the investigation against Mr Morsi over his 2011 escape from jail signalled a clear escalation in the military’s confrontation with the deposed leader and his Islamist movement.
MENA said Mr Morsi, who has been held incommunicado at an undisclosed military facility since his overthrow, had been ordered to be detained for 15 days pending the inquiry.
Egypt’s army-installed interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, said month-old Cairo vigils by Mr Morsi supporters would be “brought to an end, soon and in a legal manner,” state-run al Ahram news website reported.
On Facebook, the Brotherhood said the army had stormed its vigil overnight, triggering the violence. An army official, who declined to be named, denied this. He said the clashes were “near the Brotherhood’s sit-in area, but not at it. There is and will not be any attempt to attack the sit-in or evacuate it tonight.”
The Brotherhood is bracing for a broad crackdown by the army to wipe out a movement that emerged from decades in the shadows to take power after Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising against autocrat Hosni Mubarak, only to be deposed after a year in government.
There is deepening alarm in the West over the army’s move against Mr Morsi, which has triggered weeks of violence in the influential Arab state bordering US ally Israel. Close to 200 people have died.
The country of 84 million people forms a bridge between the Middle East and North Africa and receives $1.5 billion a year in mainly military aid from Washington.
