Egypt Protests: Muslim Brotherhood Says 35 Supporters Killed During Cairo Demonstration

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By Tom Perry and Alexander Dziadosz

CAIRO, July 8 (Reuters) - At least 42 people were killed on Monday when Islamist demonstrators enraged by the military overthrow of Egypt's elected President Mohamed Mursi said the army opened fire during morning prayers at the Cairo barracks where he is being held.

But the military said "a terrorist group" tried to storm the Republican Guard compound and one army officer had been killed and 40 wounded. Soldiers returned fire when they were attacked by armed assailants, a military source said.

The emergency services said more than 320 were wounded in a sharp escalation of Egypt's political crisis, and Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood urged people to rise up against the army, which they accuse of a military coup to remove the elected leader.

At a hospital near the Rabaa Adawia mosque where Islamists have camped out since Mursi was toppled on Wednesday, rooms were crammed with people wounded in the violence, sheets were stained with blood and medics rushed to attend to the wounded.

As an immediate consequence, the ultra-conservative Islamist Nour party, which initially backed the military intervention, said it was withdrawing from stalled negotiations to form an interim government for the transition to fresh elections.

The military has said that the overthrow was not a coup, and it was enforcing the will of the people after millions took to the streets on June 30 to call for his resignation.

But pro- and anti-Mursi protests took place in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities, and resulted in clashes on Friday and Saturday that left 35 dead.

It leaves the Arab world's largest nation of 84 million people in a perilous state, with the risk of further enmity between people on either side of the political divide while an economic crisis deepens.

SHOTS DURING PRAYERS

Abdelaziz Abdelshakua, from Sharqia Province northeast of Cairo, was wounded in his right leg with what he says was a live round.

"We were praying the dawn prayer and we heard there was shooting," he said, adding an army officer assured them no one was shooting, then suddenly they came under fire from the direction of the Republican Guard.

"They shot us with teargas, birdshot, rubber bullets -- everything. Then they used live bullets."

A Reuters journalist at the scene saw first aid helpers attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a dying man.

Al Jazeera's Egypt channel showed footage from inside a makeshift clinic near the scene of the violence, where Mursi supporters attempted to treat bloodied men.

Seven dead bodies were lined up in a row, covered in blankets and an Egyptian flag. A man placed a portrait of Mursi on one of the corpses.

Footage broadcast by state TV showed Mursi supporters throwing rocks at soldiers in riot gear on one of the main roads leading to Cairo airport.

Young men, some carrying sticks, crouched behind a building, emerging to throw petrol bombs before retreating again.

State-run television showed soldiers carrying a wounded comrade along a rock-strewn road, and news footage zoomed in on a handful of protesters firing crude handguns during clashes.

The rest of the city was for the most part calm, though armoured military vehicles closed bridges over the Nile to traffic following the violence.

The military overthrew Morsi on Wednesday after mass nationwide demonstrations led by youth activists demanding his resignation. The Brotherhood denounced the intervention as a coup and vowed peaceful resistance.

POLITICAL IMPASSE

Talks on forming a new government were already in trouble before Monday's shooting, after the Nour Party rejected two liberal-minded candidates for prime minister proposed by interim head of state Adli Mansour.

Nour, Egypt's second biggest Islamist party, which is vital to give the new authorities a veneer of Islamist backing, said it had withdrawn from the negotiations in protest at what it called the "massacre at the Republican Guard (compound)".

"The party decided the complete withdrawal from political participation in what is known as the road map," it said.

The military can ill afford a lengthy political vacuum at a time of violent upheaval and economic stagnation.

Scenes of running street battles between pro- and anti-Mursi demonstrators in Cairo, Alexandria and cities across the country have alarmed Egypt's allies, including key aid donors the United States and Europe, and Israel, with which Egypt has had a U.S.-backed peace treaty since 1979.

The violence has also shocked Egyptians, growing tired of the turmoil that began two-and-a-half years ago with the overthrow of autocrat Hosni Mubarak in a popular uprising.

In one of the most shocking scenes of the last week, video footage circulated on social and state media of what appeared to be Mursi supporters throwing two youths from a concrete tower on to a roof in the port city of Alexandria.

The images, stills from which were published on the front page of the state-run Al-Akhbar newspaper on Sunday, could not be independently verified.

On Sunday, huge crowds numbering hundreds of thousands gathered in different parts of Cairo and were peaceful, but nonetheless a reminder of the risks of further instability.

BITTER BLOW

For many Islamists, the overthrow of Egypt's first freely elected president was a bitter reversal that raised fears of a return to the suppression they endured for decades under autocratic rulers like Mubarak.

On the other side of the political divide, millions of Egyptians were happy to see the back of a leader they believed was orchestrating a creeping Islamist takeover of the state - a charge the Brotherhood has vehemently denied.

Washington has not condemned the military takeover or called it a coup, prompting suspicion within the Brotherhood that it tacitly supports the overthrow.

Obama has ordered a review to determine whether annual U.S. assistance of $1.5 billion, most of which goes to the Egyptian military, should be cut off as required by law if a country's military ousts a democratically elected leader.

Egypt can ill afford to lose foreign aid. The country appears headed for a looming funding crunch unless it can quickly access money from overseas. The local currency has lost 11 percent of its value since late last year.

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Nathan Gardels: Ex-CIA Analyst Graham Fuller on Cairo Coup

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Graham E. Fuller a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, is one of the most clear-minded and experienced analysts of political Islam. He is the author, most recently, of "A World Without Islam" and "Three Truths and a Lie," a memoir. Here is his take on the Cairo coup:

THE AMBIGUOUS GIFT OF POWER

By Graham E. Fuller

As the government of the Muslim Brotherhood faced rioting, chaos and military intervention, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi must have asked himself, "Do I really want this job?" In some senses, the presidency was the political golden apple sought by the Brotherhood for nearly a century. Indeed, Morsi had the distinction of being Egypt's first democratically elected president ever. Now that prize has turned to ashes.

Many in the West might say "good riddance." But you can't dismiss the event that glibly. The arrival of the Brotherhood into top positions of power in Egypt was not a fluke, not an accident of history. Like it or not, Islamists of various stripes -- moderate, radical, violent, peaceful, flexible, doctrinaire -- have been at the heart of political opposition to entrenched, often Western-supported dictatorships across the Arab world. Their vision of political values are homegrown, stemming organically out of Islamic culture, not borrowed and grafted wholesale from the European Enlightenment.

In Islamic political thought, the quest for social justice as a reflection of God's will ranks at the top of political values, along with the need for the ruler to consult with the people, and the requirement to enforce Islamic law. That latter stipulation, however, has been variously understood and applied in quite diverse ways over different times and places in Islamic history -- and even today. Islamists have generally been respected as grassroots elements fighting against dictatorship; they have been jailed, tortured and killed for the cause. We should never be surprised when Islamists win elections after the fall of hated dictatorships. Islamists have long had moral authority on their side.

But in Cairo in 2011, they suddenly came to power, quite unprepared for the tasks of daily administration and without a cadre of experienced government bureaucrats. "Islam is the solution" had been their chief slogan over the decades. OK, that's maybe a nice thought, but of course we demand to know more. What specific policies do you propose to meet a broad range of challenges? How will you implement them? In fairness to Morsi, the situation he inherited might have overwhelmed almost any possible president, particularly when urgent tasks could no longer be dealt with by mere fiat. In one sense he had ended up being the "accidental candidate" among Brotherhood leaders.

Sadly, in the first transition in Egyptian history in 2011 from dictatorship to democratic practice, the rules of the game were written as they went, and the learning curve -- for the president, parliament, bureaucrats, political parties, the political opposition, police, army, and voters -- is steep. Demonstrations and rioting cannot serve as the chief mechanism for transmitting the public's policy preferences. Regrettably, this time, the entire spectrum of the Egyptian political opposition seemed happy to revert to extra-legal measures to bring change rather than work, for sure more slowly, through specified legitimate electoral channels.

And all parties to the game in the initial rush to power had cut deals and bargains and bend regulations and procedures in their own interests, inventing rules as they went along. Of course, opportunism is a familiar scene in all governance, even in the U.S. But rarely have the stakes been so high, the public expectations so unrealistic, the tasks so urgent, the needs of the long-suffering public so pressing, as in Egypt. And what's more, Morsi and his government, while hardly extreme or radical, could not bring convincing competence to his job.

Ideally Morsi should have served until the next elections. Exerting extra-legal means of changing governments in Egypt, yet again, defeats the few democratic gains made two years ago. A Brotherhood actually voted out of office would have been more politically chastened and would have actually learned something, compared with a Brotherhood that sees itself removed illegally and by force. But make no mistake: The Brotherhood, and Islam as a political value in politics, is not going away. The evolution of Islamist political thinking will continue to evolve in this Egyptian school of hard knocks; we can look at Turkey, where a moderate Islamist movement found itself repeatedly tested over the decades until it emerged with the pragmatic, highly successful ruling party in power today.

Several outcomes are now possible. Disappearance of the Brotherhood is not one of them. Morsi and the Islamists may nourish bitter grievances at the travesty of democratic practice. If they are not allowed to feature somewhat prominently in whatever next government is set up, they could be a dangerous and aggrieved element; they are simply too big and too important to be excluded. Alternatively, the Brotherhood, and even more the fundamentalist Salafi Islamists, may now just wonder: Is attaining political office -- the assumption of overwhelmingly daunting economic, social and political problems -- a prize really worth having at this juncture? The credibility of the Brotherhood among much of the population has now suffered a major, though not fatal, blow.

Many Islamist politicians may decide that it's better to maintain a movement, or remain in the political opposition, than to hold the reins as a way to influence public policy.
Democratic Egypt has failed in its first test -- in the irresponsible actions of both the government and the opposition, including the "liberals." Will Egypt now revert to another decade of gray military tutelage, having learned nothing and back to square one? Or will its population be able to fashion a new political arrangement, respected by both winners and losers of elections, to try once again?

© 2013 GLOBAL VIEWPOINT NETWORK/TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES

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Egypt protests: protesters invade, ransack headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo (VIDEO/photos)

The headquarters of the Cairo of Egypt rulers that the Muslim Brotherhood was invaded by young people on Monday. (AP)

CAIRO, July 1 (Reuters) - the headquarters of the Cairo of Egypt statement that Muslim Brotherhood was invaded by youths who looted the building after those inside had been evacuated on Monday after a night of violence.

Security sources said that five people were killed in hours of fighting around the besieged building. Medical sources said that more than 100 wounded. Reuters journalists saw youths throw Molotov cocktails and stones at the offices. Guards inside opened fire.

On the morning of Monday, people inside were still firing at young people outside. Reuters journalists saw two men hit.

A brotherhood spokesman later said that the movement had evacuated staff from within. Live TV pictures showed men inside, throwing the blackened windows computer. One flew an Egyptian flag from a balcony.

(Reporting by asthma Alsharif and Tom Perry;) Edited by Alastair Macdonald)

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