Egypt Sees High Tensions From Cairo To Suez

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Internet and telephone communications are difficult with Cairo after a night of riots triggered by the massacre of the stadium in Port Said, missionaries in Cairo told MISNA, and press sources report that there were at least two dead and hundreds injured in disturbances.

“Surfing the net is quite an undertaking – says Father Luciano Verdoscia, a Comboni missionary – and many phones do not work: the tension is high, but to understand what might happen we must wait until the end of Friday prayers.”

Yesterday evening and last night the most serious violence occurred in downtown Cairo, near the headquarters of the Ministry of Interior, and in the northern city of Suez. According to the national news agency ”Mena”, clashes between police and protesters trying to reach the ministry have caused at least 388 injured, in many cases asphyxiated by tear gas or hit by stones.

Two young men in Suez were killed after being involved in what some media reportshave presented as an assault on a police station.

The protests were revived, a year after the revolution that ended thirty years of the reign of President Hosni Mubarak, after the killing of 74 people during an invasion ofthe stadium field at the end of a league match between Al Masry and -Al-Ahly.

Many, not only the young protagonists of the revolution, but also leaders of the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood, which won a majority on the recent elections, have argued that there is a behind the massacre the military junta in power since the fall of Mubarak or of “those with nostalgia” for the old regime.

MISNA

MISNA, or the Missionary International Service News Agency, provides daily news ‘from, about and for’ the 'world’s Souths', not just in the geographical sense, since December 1997.

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