Activists had gathered to call for fight against sexual harassment
Activists from “The Street is Ours , an opposition group, were barred from holding a demonstration protesting alleged incidents of sexual attacks three weeks ago.
Dozens of cars and armored vehicles and hundreds of state security members filled the blocks surrounding the Metro Cinema, the site of the alleged attacks during the Eid al-Fitr.
Policemen kept several activists and journalists from approaching the cinema. Security forces pursued over a dozen demonstrators and journalists through downtown, barricading them inside the nearby Excelsior Café in a tense hour-long standoff.
Several activists and journalists were physically harassed, and two, Nadia Mabrouk and Walid Salah, were arrested.
“They beat me up when I was taking pictures, said Reuters photographer Abdel Nasser Nouri. “They put me in a car and told me ‘don’t take any more pictures, and don’t come here again.’ Then they drove me away.
He was released him several blocks away from the cinema.
Organizer Magda Adly, Director of the Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victoms of Torture, sat barricaded inside the Excelsior Café.
“When we tried to approach Talaat Harb street the police surrounded us and threatened us, they told us ‘if you don’t leave we will arrest you, we will do what we have to with you people’, she told The Daily Star Egypt.
“The United States is responsible for all of this! exclaimed Rabaa Fahmy, a staff lawyer for the Nadim Center who was also inside the Excelsior café.
“They cause these problems because they support our government. All of their propaganda about democracy is false because they make alliances with dictatorial regimes like ours.
“I am really scared to leave right now, said a female AUC student, after café patrons watched policemen arrest a young veiled woman, shaking her violently by her veil. The young woman did not want to be named.
“Plainclothes policemen were following us from the beginning of the street, said another female AUC student activist who did not want to be named.
“They told us leave for our own good, there is going to be trouble.
The demonstration was to call further attention to what activists called the failure of the security forces to protect the rights of Egyptian civilians and keep the streets safe.
