CAIRO: Several attempts to reach a truce between police and protesters in Mohamed Mahmoud Street were broken by outbursts of violence as clashes continued for the fifth day off Tahrir Square.
By 8.30 pm sporadic violence was seen on the street, as teargas canisters were fired onto protesters in the street. Officers told TV they are trying to negotiate with protesters ways to restore calm and avoid future clashes.
On the fifth day of a violent stalemate, clashes had resumed on Mohamed Mahmoud Street following a truce negotiated by Muslim clerics briefly held in the late afternoon, after both the protesters and the police pulled back from the front line street.
State television, meanwhile, broadcast footage from the scene of the clashes showing army soldiers forming a human chain between the protesters and the police in a bid to stop the violence.
The truce was soon breached when police fired a barrage of tear gas and rubber bullets and the protesters responded with rocks. It was not clear who resumed the fighting.
But negotiations between plainclothed men, believed to be officers, and protesters trying to restrain others brought calm after 7 pm. By 8 pm police pulled out from the street and protesters walked around freely.
TV footage showed soldiers firing as officers stood between them and the protesters trying to restore the truce. Eyewitnesses accounts suggested soldiers might be acting without orders.
A short while earlier, tension was high in the area on the side streets between Tahrir and the interior ministry, which is responsible for the police, with many young protesters vomiting and coughing incessantly from the tear gas fired by the police. Others wounded by rubber bullets were hurriedly ferried by motorcycle to field hospitals.
El-Nadeem Center, an Egyptian rights group known for its careful research of victims of police violence, said late Tuesday that the number of protesters killed in clashes nationwide since Saturday is 38, three more than the Health Ministry’s death toll, which went up to 35 on Wednesday. All but four of the deaths were in Cairo. A Reuters count confirmed the number at 38, after a man was killed in Alexandria and another died in what the state news agency MENA said was an attack on a police station in the northern town of Marsa Matrouh.
The clashes also have left at least 2,000 protesters wounded, mostly from gas inhalation or injuries caused by rubber bullets fired by the army and the police. The police deny using live ammunition.
Human Rights Watch on Tuesday cited morgue officials as saying at least 20 people have been killed by live ammunition.
Shady el-Nagar, a doctor in one of Tahrir’s field hospitals, said three bodies arrived in the facility on Wednesday. All three had bullet wounds.
"We don’t know if these were caused by live ammunition or pellets because pellets can be deadly when fired from a short distance," he said.
The turmoil broke out just days before the start of staggered parliamentary elections on Nov. 28. The votes will take place over months and conclude in March.
The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s strongest and best organized group, is not taking part in the ongoing protests in a move that is widely interpreted to be a reflection of its desire not to do anything that could derail the election, which it hopes win along with its allies.
Hundreds of Brotherhood supporters, however, have defied the leadership and joined the crowds in the square. Their participation is not likely to influence the Brotherhood’s leadership or narrow the rift between the Islamist group and the secular organizations behind the uprising that toppled Mubarak and which are behind the latest spate of protests.
Sixty years after it was banned, the Brotherhood found itself empowered in the wake of the Feb. 11 ouster of Mubarak. It moved swiftly after the overthrow of Mubarak to form its own party, Freedom and Justice, to contest the parliamentary election.
Notorious for its political opportunism, the Brotherhood and its allies are hoping to win enough seats in the next legislature to push through a new constitution with an Islamic slant and bring this mainly Muslim nation of some 85 million people closer to being an Islamic state.
As dusk fell, thousands of people, many of them onlookers, had crowded into Tahrir, which was also the arena of protests which toppled President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11.
Vendors were selling everything from snacks to face masks for protection against wafting tear gas.
Fatihia Abdul Ezz, a 60-year-old woman, said she had come to the square for the first time after seeing images of violence.
"They (the army rulers) were with Mubarak from the start," she said. "I came when I saw our sons being killed."
Protesters unfurled a huge sign denouncing army commander Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, his deputy Sami Enan and the council that has run Egypt since Mubarak’s overthrow.
"Down, down with military rule. We the people are the red line. The people want to bring down the field marshal, Sami Enan and the military council," it read.
One man walked around the square holding aloft 10 spent tear gas shells, along with cartridge casings threaded on a string. –Additional reporting by Daily News Egypt.
Thousands of Egyptians gather during a demonstration at Tahrir Square in Cairo on Nov. 23, demanding an end to military rule, despite a promise by the country’s interim leader to transfer power to an elected president by mid-2012. Ambulances carry the injured from Mohamed Mahmoud Street. (AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams)
