Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf expressed regret on Monday for a violent crackdown on demonstrators in Cairo over the weekend and said he had asked the minister of justice to investigate.
“All of us, the people, the army and the government, feel regret for the events of last Saturday,” Sharaf said in a speech broadcast on Egyptian television.
Rights groups accused the army of using excessive force when it tried to remove protesters early on Saturday, hours after hundreds of thousands had massed for one of the biggest protests since former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted.
The protesters were demanding a deeper purge of corrupt officials and that Egypt’s ruling military council turn the country’s affairs over to civilian rule.
Medical sources said 13 men were wounded by gunfire and two people died when the army tried to clear the protesters from Tahrir Square during a curfew.
“There are demands by the people over what happened, to find out the facts, and for that I have asked my colleague the minister of justice to take the necessary steps to assure that those demands are achieved,” Sharaf said.
Around 2,000 protesters on Monday defied an army demand to quit Tahrir Square, blocking traffic with coils of barbed wire left by the army when it withdrew after the Saturday clashes.
Egypt’s public prosecutor ordered that Safwat Sherif, former head of the upper house of parliament, be detained for 15 days as part of a probe into graft accusations, state news agency MENA said.
A special panel formed to uncover illicit gains also summoned Fathi Sorour, former speaker of the lower house of parliament, for questioning today over accusations he had amassed large amounts of money illegally, MENA reported.
Sherif and Sorour were senior members of Mubarak’s ruling party and among his closest aides. Both are main targets of reformers seeking tough action against figures of the past administration.
Meanwhile, a three-year prison sentence handed to a blogger who criticized Egypt’s army suggests the country’s military rulers are drawing red lines around permissible speech, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.
The military council ruling Egypt said that 25-year-old activist Maikel Nabil had used “inappropriate language” and defamed the military, and that his call for military conscription to be scrapped would have a negative effect on young Egyptians.
Nabil’s lawyers were told the judge would rule on Tuesday, but they discovered on Monday that he had already been sentenced a day earlier in their absence, HRW cited defense lawyer Adel Ramadan as saying.
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