By Mai Shams El-Din
CAIRO: Egypt’s military prosecution ordered the detainment of 49 Tahrir protesters for 15 days pending investigation.
The protesters were arrested during violent clashes with riot police on Tuesday and Wednesday around Tahrir Square, which left more than 1,000 injured.
“The protesters that we know by name are 20, but we were told by the prosecution that there were around 49 interrogated on Wednesday without their lawyers. But the prosecution might have assigned lawyers to defend them,” Ahmed Ragheb, lawyer at the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, told Daily News Egypt.
Protesters were charged with rioting and throwing stones at police officers.
An American and a Briton were also arrested in the overnight clashes, the official MENA news agency said, without identifying either of them.
A military source said the two were not among the 49 protesters who had been referred to the military prosecution earlier on Wednesday.
Activist Loai Nagaty, computer science student at Al-Shorouk Academy, was among the 49 held pending investigation, according to his brother Taher.
“My brother was just tweeting about the violent clashes and did not even throw any stones, he is very thin and has heart problems,” Taher told DNE, referring to his brother’s use of the micro-blogging website Twitter.
“His last tweet was on Wednesday at 4 am, and then no one heard anything about him until one of his friends told me he was referred to military prison at 10 pm,” he added.
Taher said that his brother was arrested, interrogated, and sent to military prison within five hours. Meanwhile, it took Taher 10 hours to get a visit permit to see his brother.
“We are still trying to deliver medicine to him,” Taher said. “When we tried to find out what happened to him, we searched for the case number but discovered that the military prosecution was in too much of a rush to even assign one.”
Loai’s lawyer Ahmed Heshmat was with him in Tahrir Square on Tuesday until 11 pm, and presented his testimony in front of the prosecution after Loai was interrogated to prove that he did not throw stones.
“We knew that Loai denied all these charges and confirmed that all his tweets were just to inform people of the events and were not intended to be published in any newspaper or TV channel,” Taher said.
Meanwhile, the National Council of Human Rights’ fact-finding committee visited Tahrir Square Wednesday to start an investigation into the clashes.
Member of the committee Amr Hamzamy said in a televised interview on Al-Hayat channel that they collected evidence of excessive use of violence by the police, including teargas canisters and rubber bullets, as well as documented testimonies of protesters and their injuries.
Egypt’s Ministry of Health said in a statement Wednesday that 1,036 were injured, 916 of which were treated onsite.
Injuries treated at Tahrir Square field hospitals differed over time. On Tuesday evening, when clashes first erupted, most of the injuries were caused by the effects of teargas. By Wednesday morning, there were cut wounds caused by stones, glass and rubber bullets, according to Dr. Shadia Abdel Rahman.
“There were also third degree burns because protesters held teargas canisters and threw them back at police — there were more injuries than I could count,” Abdel Rahman told DNE.
“The smell of the teargas was also different than during the revolution; they were stronger and caused fatigue, dizziness, muscle aches and lack of concentration,” she added.
On Wednesday, the volunteer doctor said she also saw a lot of pellet injuries.
–Additional reporting by AFP
