At least 18 people were killed in political violence on Sunday, the fourth anniversary of the Arab Spring uprising, a reminder of the ruthless crackdown the military-backed Egyptian government has used to silence any echoes of that revolt.
Security officials said that three of those killed were militants trying to plant bombs that accidentally exploded in two Nile Delta towns, and three others were police conscripts. At least 12 civilians were killed by security forces.
As many as 10 civilians were killed in Cairo’s al-Matariyya district, a frequent flashpoint on the northern edge of the capital, and dozens of civilians were reportedly injured in clashes at scattered protests around the nation.
Photo: AFP
After nearly 18 months of recurring police shootings at street protests since the military takeover in 2013, it was the deaths of two others killed over the weekend that most captured Egypt’s attention.
Sondos Reda Abu Bakr, a 17-year-old high-school student, was killed on Friday by police officers firing birdshot at a demonstration in Alexandria in support of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, 32, a left-leaning poet and activist, was killed in Cairo. She was a member of a socialist political party that backed Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and the military takeover he led in 2013.
Neither of the women was likely to have posed any threat.
Al-Sabbagh was walking in a small group of fellow party members on Saturday with a wreath of flowers to lay in Tahrir Square to honor demonstrators killed there during previous protests, according to a witness account and a video recording of the scene.
When her group took up the Arab Spring chant for “bread, freedom and social justice,” a contingent of masked riot police officers as numerous as the marchers “fired bullets and gas within minutes,” according to a Facebook post by Azza Soliman, a prominent human rights lawyer who was nearby at the time.
In the video, the police officers are seen firing guns from across a narrow street. A friend, crouching down, grabs al-Sabbagh around the waist as she stands upright with blood running down her face. Then he is seen hurriedly carrying her away while the gunfire continues. A forensic report said birdshot fired at close range had pierced her lung and heart, news outlets reported.
The deaths on the anniversary of the revolt were predictable, rights activists said, because the swift use of firearms has become de facto police policy toward any unauthorized public assembly, especially in downtown Cairo.
On the anniversary last year, more than 50 people died in clashes with police officers.
However, the stories of the two unarmed women, and most of all the vivid images of al-Sabbagh’s death, have dramatized the police violence more effectively than any statistics, rights advocates added.
“She is a member of a very tame opposition party, by no means a revolutionary, and yet she is subjected to this brutal force,” Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights researcher Amr Abdel Rahman said. “The streets are becoming much less safe for Egyptian activists from any walk of the political spectrum than it was even last year.”
Arabic Network for Human Rights Information executive director Gamal Eid said that only a small demonstration in support of al-Sisi appeared to have escaped police violence. So the police killings, including al-Sabbagh’s, had sent a clear message.
“If you object to al-Sisi, your blood is permissible,” Eid said, adding that the president’s police force was clenching its fist even more tightly than former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s — “with all its monstrosity.”
Unable to dismiss al-Sabbagh as a violent agitator or a Muslim militant, Egyptian officials and the government’s supporters have begun to speculate — however improbably — that someone other than a police officer might have fired the shot that killed her.
“We need a clear answer: Who killed Shaimaa al-Sabbagh?” pro-government television talk show host Lamees Hadidi asked, as though it were a mystery.
Egyptian Ministry of the Interior spokesman Major General Hany Abdel Latif raised the same question, saying that police officers could not have killed al-Sabbagh.
“I assure you that all the security apparatuses are working to find out who did this,” he said in an interview. “No one is above the law.”
He disputed the accounts of witnesses and rights groups that police officers invariably resort to birdshot when dispersing any crowd.
“This is completely unacceptable,” he said.
Hundreds gathered in al-Sabbagh’s hometown, Alexandria, on Sunday to march from her home to the Manarah Cemetery for her burial, and they chanted against the interior ministry and “military rule.”
However, afraid of coming under attack themselves, some in the crowd also chanted against the Muslim Brotherhood, to be sure that no one assaulted them as a part of the outlawed Muslim groups, said Hakim Abdelnaem, a friend and political ally of al-Sabbagh.
“There were many calls for protests, but the streets are full of the government, with informants everywhere, and any protests can expect to be immediately attacked by the police, any groups that tries to do anything is faced with very violent confrontation without warning,” he said.
So the mourners canceled the protests, Abdelnaem said.
“It was decided that there was no need to lose more people today,” he added.
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