CAIRO: At least 42 people were killed in Cairo on Monday, medical sources said, when Islamist protesters angered by the military overthrow of President Mohamed Mursi said they were fired on at the Cairo military barracks where he is being held.
More than 200 were wounded in a sharp escalation of Egypt’s political crisis, and Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood urged Egyptians to rise up against the army, which they accuse of a military coup to remove the elected leader.
The military said “a terrorist group” tried to storm the Republican Guard compound and one army officer had been killed and 40 wounded. Soldiers returned fire when they were attacked by armed assailants, a military source said.
At a hospital near the Rabaa Adawia mosque where Islamists have camped out since Mursi was toppled on Wednesday, rooms were crammed with people wounded in the violence. Many of the sheets and clothes were heavily stained with blood.
The Brotherhood’s official spokesman, Gehad El-Haddad, who is at a pro-Mursi sit-in at a mosque near the scene, said shooting broke out in the early morning while Islamists were praying and staging a peaceful sit-in outside the barracks. As an immediate consequence, the ultra-conservative Islamist Nour party, which initially supported the military intervention, said it was withdrawing from stalled negotiations to form an interim government for the transition to fresh elections.
The military has said that the overthrow was not a coup, and it was enforcing the will of the people after hundreds of thousands took to the streets on June 30 to call for his resignation.
But pro- and anti-Mursi protests continued in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities, and resulted in clashes on Friday and Saturday that left than 35 dead.
It leaves the Arab world’s largest nation of 84 million people in a perilous state, with the risk of further enmity between people on either side of the political divide while an economic crisis deepens.
Abdelaziz Abdelshakua, from Sharqia Province northeast of Cairo, was wounded in his right leg with what he says was a live round.
“We were praying the dawn prayer and we heard there was shooting,” he said. He said an army officer assured them no one was shooting, then suddenly they were under fire from the direction of the Republican Guard.
“They shot us with teargas, birdshot, rubber bullets — everything. Then they used live bullets.”
Al Jazeera’s Egypt news channel broadcast footage of what appeared to be five men killed in the violence, and medics trying to revive a man at a makeshift clinic at a nearby pro-Mursi sit-in. A Reuters journalist at the scene saw first aid helpers attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a dying man. Wounded people were being ferried to the field hospital on motorbikes, given first aid treatment and taken away in ambulances. (PTI)