Egyptian security forces have killed more than a thousand and arrested at least as many in just the nine days since they dispersed two Brotherhood-led sit-ins by tens of thousands of Morsi supporters. In addition to detaining Mr. Morsi incommunicado, the police have arrested the Brotherhood’s top spiritual leaders and much of its governing board, forcing a rushed and secret selection of new leadership. Its officials say most of its second- and third-tier leaders are dead or missing; on Friday an official spokesman was arrested. The Brotherhood-led coalition against the takeover had called for the protests under the banner Friday of Martyrs. Crowds of a few hundred, growing to as many as a few thousand in some places, gathered after prayers at about two dozen mosques around Cairo. But many said they planned to stay in their own neighborhoods and head home early. For the first time since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, many demonstrators were afraid to give their names, and some denied, unconvincingly, an affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood or any other Islamist group. “Everyone’s very scared of the security forces,” said Ismail Mustafa, 27, a technician demonstrating in Helwan, just south of Cairo along the Nile. “We have lost many martyrs.” In addition to a state of emergency suspending the right to due process and other limits on the police, the new government has imposed a strict curfew of 7 p.m. in half the country as well as the capital, a normally frenetic 24-hour city of about 20 million. And unlike previous efforts to impose such restrictions under Mr. Mubarak or the generals who took power from him, this one has scared residents into obedience. “Sisi is treating us as if we are not human,” said Sarah Gad, 24, a software engineer in a full-face veil, complaining about the intense crowds as people rushed to squeeze in their round-the-clock schedules before the curfew. “They are packing us into subway cars as if we were chickens and making all the people sleep at 7 p.m.” In at least one neighborhood, Shobra, demonstrators met enough hostility from the neighbors that their crowd dispersed within a few hours, witnesses said.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 22:55:30 +0000
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