Violence by Egyptian security forces taking toll on protesters
IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency
Cairo, Feb 9, IRNA -- One Egyptian protester was killed and 61 were injured when the security forces opened fire at protesters who laid barracks on way to the parliament on Wednesday.
On the 16th day of the uprising, there were reports of thousands demonstrating in several other cities around the country while protesters began to gather again in Tahrir Square.
The relentless crackdown of the protesters by the security forces instigated the radical protesters to take arms so in one incident they attacked a police station with RPGs, the Rocket Propelled Grenades injuring a police officer.
Violent clashes between opponents and supporters of President Mubarak led to more than 70 injuries in recent days, the state-owned newspaper al-Ahram said, while government officials said the protests had spread to the previously quiet southern region of Upper Egypt.
Thousands protested in the city of Wadi El Jedid. Television images also showed crowds gathering in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city.
Increasingly, the political clamor for Mubarak’s ouster seemed to be complemented by strikes and stoppages among workers in Cairo and the other cities.
In another industrial action, about 6,000 workers at five service companies owned by the Suez Canal Authority — a major component of the Egyptian economy — began a sit-in protest.
There was no immediate suggestion of disruptions to shipping in the canal, a vital international waterway leading from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.
More than 2,000 textile workers and others in Suez demonstrated as well, al-Ahram said.
The al-Ahram’s coverage was a departure from its usual practice of avoiding reporting that might embarrass the government.
At one factory in the textile town of Mahalla, more than striking 1,500 workers blocked roads, and more than 2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in the city of Quesna went on strike while some 5,000 unemployed youth stormed a government building in Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor.
For many foreign visitors to Egypt, Aswan is known as a starting point or destination for luxury cruises to and from Luxor on the Nile River.
In Cairo, sanitation workers demonstrated around their headquarters in Dokki.
In the lobby of al-Ahram — the flagship government newspaper and a cornerstone of the Egyptian establishment — journalists on Wednesday were in open revolt against the newspaper’s management and editorial policies.
Some called their protest a microcosm of the Egyptian uprising, with young journalists leading demands for better working conditions and less biased coverage.
The turmoil at the newspaper has already changed editorial content, with the English-language online edition openly criticizing what it called “the warped and falsified coverage by state media” of the protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.
Several of the dozens of protesters occupying the lobby on Wednesday said the editor of the English-language division heads to the square to join the protests every night, joined by many of the staff.
The scattered protests and labor unrest seemed symptomatic of an emerging trend for some Egyptians to air an array of grievances, some related to the protests and some of an older origin.
Many at the protests buttonholed Americans to express deep disappointment with President Obama, shaking their heads at his ambiguous messages about an orderly transition. They warned that the country risked incurring a resentment from the Egyptian people that could last long after Mubarak is gone.
Islamic Republic News Agency/IRNA NewsCode: 30235123
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