By Tamim Elyan
CAIRO: One of two men who set themselves ablaze Tuesday died in Alexandria. The other was transferred to a Cairo hospital with minimum burns.
Security officials said Ahmed Hashem El-Sayed, a 25-year-old unemployed man died, in hospital after he set himself on fire on the roof of his home in the port city of Alexandria.
He suffered third-degree burns.
El-Sayed has been unemployed for a year and suffered from depression, officials said.
Mohamed Hassan, a 50-year-old lawyer, set himself on fire Tuesday in front of the Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center in downtown Cairo.
He was transferred to Mounira Hospital and found to have superficial burns on his right leg with 5 percent intensity, according to the Ministry of Health.
A low-ranking policeman at the scene threw himself at Hassan to prevent the fire from spreading to his whole body. There were no official reports of the policeman being transferred to the hospital, indicating that he wasn’t injured in the process.
In an attempt to explain Hassan’s motives, a security official told reporters outside the hospital Tuesday afternoon that the lawyer had complained to the police that his daughter had fled home. He was later informed that she got married without his consent.
Police said they also arrested a man who was carrying two jerry cans of petrol near parliament in Cairo on the presumption that he was going to set himself on fire.
A man from Ismailia had set himself ablaze a day earlier in front of the nearby People’s Assembly. He was reportedly protesting a government policy preventing restaurant owners from buying cheap subsidized bread to resell to their patrons.
“It’s a symbolic indication of general state of congestion in the country,” Mamdouh Ismail, board member of the Lawyers’ Syndicate, said as he was visiting Hassan at the hospital Tuesday.
Similar incidents of self-immolation were reported in Algeria and Mauritania this week.
Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi had set himself on fire last month, triggering a series of protests throughout the country that eventually led President Zain El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country last Friday. –Additional reporting by agencies.
