The Lede is following events on Wednesday in Egypt, where the security forces used deadly force to disperse sit-ins by supporters of the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi.
10:46 P.M. Video of Deadly Clashes From Egyptian Sites
While reported efforts by the security forces to confiscate camera equipment as they stormed two Islamist protest camps in Cairo on Wednesday perhaps explained the relatively small amount of footage shot by participants in the sit-ins posted online Egyptian news sites did publish dozens of clips of the day’s events.
One brief clip from Youm 7, recorded during what was described on YouTube as an exchange of fire between Muslim Brotherhood and the security forces, offered clear images of police officers firing their weapons.
Egyptian police officers in bulletproof vests and gas masks could be seen arresting Morsi supporters inside the protest camp in Nahda Square, near Cairo University in video from the news site El Badil.
While the footage showed that some protesters were led away peacefully, others were beaten and kicked as they were led away. One old woman in black robes tried to kiss two police officers’ hands, and they both recoiled at her touch.
The same site published video of the security forces tearing apart that protest camp and firing teargas at protesters after they had seized the area.
Video from Raasd, an Islamist-leaning news site, showed a detained protester in Rabaa al-Adaweya Square being beaten by members of the security forces as they led him to a police van.
The detainee could be seen speaking calmly to an officer at the start of the clip, before a group of club wielding officers punched and kicked him.
The same site circulated video said to show a government sniper taking aim from a rooftop near the sit-in.
A cameraman for Raasd was one of four journalists reportedly killed in Cairo on Wednesday, according to Ahram Online, a state-owned English-language news site.
One of the most widely-viewed clips of the day was extremely graphic, distressing video showing the charred bodies of three protesters reportedly killed during the raid on the camp in Nahda Square, which was published by El Watan.
By late afternoon on Wednesday, violence had spread from the original location of the two protest camps to other streets and squares across the city. As our colleague Kareem Fahim reported, Islamists ejected from Nahda Square near Cairo University briefly rallied in the upscale neighborhood of Mohandiseen, even constructing a stage where they apparently hoped to establish a new protest camp.
Another El Badil clip, showing young men pelting each other with rocks, was said to show Morsi supporters fighting with residents of Mohandiseen.
More video from Mohandiseen, posted on YouTube by Youm 7, showed a group of men described as Morsi supporters smashing up an empty police car, before chasing and kicking a man who is bleeding profusely from the head and could be a police officer.
The same bloodied man also appeared in a brief clip uploaded to YouTube by El Shorouk, which identified him as a police officer.
Two badly injured protesters, apparently seeking shelter inside a garage near clashes on Batal Ahmed Abdelaziz Street in Mohandiseen, were caught on video by a photographer for the news site Al Fagr. A group of people who seemed to be residents of the neighborhood offered the two wounded men help.
In the video, one of the men repeatedly snapped his fingers as he bleed profusely from the head; the other writhed slowly on the ground from what appeared to be an injury to his back. A woman’s voice could be heard off-camera asking, “Do you want water?” Several men then chimed in, “What do you want?” At the end of the clip, the men were brought outside and loaded onto a motorcycle, as one of the residents told the others, “They are human beings.”
9:02 P.M. Photographer Says Police Jeep Reversed Off Bridge
Faced with criticism for killing hundreds of protesters to disperse two sit-ins in Cairo on Wednesday, Egypt’s interior ministry pointed to evidence that police officers were wounded and killed in the fighting that broke out after the assault on the protest camps began.
The ministry posted video of wounded officers on its YouTube channel, but the most dramatic example of casualties among the security forces during the clashes in Cairo was an incident in which a police jeep hurtled off the October 6 Bridge to the street below.
Aly Hazzaa, a photojournalist who witnessed the incident, filed horrifying images of that crash to the Cairene newspaper El Shorouk, and the impact on the street below was caught on video posted on YouTube by another news site, El Fagr.
Images of the vehicle plunging to the ground, and of an officer’s body on the pavement below, were widely shared online by opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood who claimed that the Islamists had pushed the vehicle off the overpass and described the incident as proof of their deadly intent.
The activist blogger Adel Abdel Ghafar told The Lede that Brotherhood supporters had boastfully claimed credit on Facebook for pushing the jeep off the bridge, but there was no visual evidence of that taking place.
Instead, according to the photographer who witnessed the event, it appears that the driver’s efforts to evade rock-throwing protesters, by reversing quickly while driving right at the edge of the bridge, caused the jeep to crash through the barrier.
The photographer, Mr. Hazzaa, later posted a photo essay on the day’s events on his personal blog, including one clear image of the police officer driving the jeep near the edge of the bridge as protesters hurled rocks at the vehicle.
According to the photographer’s captions, the officer crashed the jeep through the barrier as he reversed away from the protesters. The fact that all of the images showed a light post from the bridge crashing to the ground at the rear of the vehicle appeared to support this account.
Video posted online later by another news site, El Badil, which showed another vehicle crashing into a railing at the side of the bridge as it drove past protesters, illustrated how easy it was for drivers to lose control as they tried to pass through the clashes on the intricate overpass.
Update, Thursday, 6:21 p.m. | Video showing exactly what happened to the jeep, posted on YouTube by the Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, proves that the photographer’s account was entirely accurate. The jeep, after colliding with another vehicle on the bridge, reversed sharply and crashed through the barrier.
4:23 P.M. Churches Burn After Islamist Sit-In Attacked
As violence raged in Cairo on Wednesday, Egyptian journalists and rights workers reported a wave of attacks on churches and Christian-owned businesses in several parts of the country, apparently reflecting a belief by some supporters of the deposed president Mohamed Morsi that the country’s Coptic Christian minority were complicit in his ouster.
In a series of Twitter updates, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a prominent human rights organization in Cairo, reported that at least five churches had been attacked, including four that it said had been burnt.
One of the churches was in Suez province, at the mouth of the Suez Canal, and the rest were in Fayoum, Sohag and Minya in Upper Egypt, the country’s poor central and southern region, which has historically been an important center for both Egyptian Christianity and hard-line Islamism.
The English-language news site Mada Masr spoke to residents of Sohag by phone on Wednesday and published an account of violence in that city, including attacks on churches and clashes between security forces and members of Jama’a al-Islamiya, a hard-line Islamist group that was part of a militant campaign against the Egyptian state in the 1990s.
That group become politically active after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, fielding candidates in parliamentary elections in 2011 and emerging over the last year as an important ally to Mr. Morsi.
In Sohag, Bishop of Mar Girgis Church Moussa Ibrahim told Mada Masr that the church was set ablaze by Muslim Brotherhood supporters at 9:30 a.m. in the absence of police forces, despite repeated threats against the church.
The biggest church in the governorate, Mar Girgis, is located in Thakafa Square near the Brotherhood sit-in. Three other small churches were also attacked in Sohag, but Ibrahim could not confirm the extent of the damage.
Coptic residents living near the church told Mada Masr that shops owned by Copts and Muslims in front of the church were destroyed. Live shots were heard in the area as citizens began forming popular committees.
A source who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity said that at least two churches — Saint Dimiana, the main church in the city, and Virgin Mary, located in Degla village — were attacked and burned down. Clashes between police and members of Jama’a al-Islamiya are ongoing on the Corniche.
Source said that a sit-in by Morsi supporters is taking place in the city’s main Palace Square, where incitement against Coptic residents is incessant and property is being destroyed, including two cruise ships.
Haleem al-Sharani, an Egyptian journalist, drew attention on Twitter to a picture said to show one of the burning churches in Minya.
Mostafa Hussein, an activist blogger, pointed to a series of pictures that showed a burning church in Sohag.
Mr. Hussein also noted on Twitter that one widely circulated image of a burned-out church was not taken in Egypt on Wednesday but in Iraq in 2010.
4:14 P.M. Journalists Among the Casualties of Deadly Raid
Sky News, the British satellite channel, broadcast a tribute to Mick Deane, the station’s veteran cameramen who was shot and killed on Wednesday as he recorded the raid by Egyptian security forces on the Islamist protest camp in Cairo. The video report includes the last few seconds of footage recorded by Mr. Deane, who was 61.
Habiba Ahmed Abd Elaziz, a 26-year-old reporter for Xpress in the United Arab Emirates, was also shot and killed near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque, Gulf News reports. Her sister, Arwa Ramadan, said that Ms. Elaziz, an Egyptian who lived and worked in Sharjah, had spoken to their mother early Wednesday, “but when she called again at 12 noon, there was no response. She called again, and somebody picked up the phone and told her Habiba was dead. My dad, who is in Egypt right now, confirmed it later.”
According to a final exchange of text messages her mother posted on Facebook, later
published by The National in Abu Dhabi, the young reporter was in the media
center at the protest camp as the raid began on Wednesday morning.
Habiba: The army and the police are indeed moving around the gates. The media center was turned into a field hospital and the square is on high alert.
Mother: Where are you?
Habiba: Only journalists were allowed to remain in the building. I’m supposed to cover the monument in case the battle starts.
Mother: The monument is a bit far from Rabia.
Habiba: Field security is at every gate now. I am in the media center. It isn’t far at all in fact and the door is big and it can be broken through easily.
Despite claims by Egypt’s prime minister and interior minister that reporters and rights workers had been allowed to observe the security operation, several other journalists were reportedly beaten, harassed or shot.
Our Egyptian colleague Mayy El Sheikh posted a harrowing account of reporting under fire.
As The Washington Post reports, several other journalists, including The Post’s Abigail Hauslohner, were threatened by police officers, who broke cameras and wiped images from phones.
Mohamed Soltan, an Egyptian-American who traveled from Ohio to take part in the sit-in and document it on Twitter with his iPhone, reported that he was shot in the arm as he gave an interview.
3:08 P.M. Video Said to Show Jailbreak at Rural Egyptian Prison
As violence exploded in the streets of Cairo on Wednesday, video uploaded to YouTube suggested similar strife gripping the city of Beni Suef, the capital of a rural province more than 100 miles south of Cairo. The brief clip, which could not be independently confirmed, showed a scene of chaos and destruction at a burning police station in the city.
In the video, dozens of young men stand in the street in front of a police station as flames engulf a nearby row of vehicles, sending a dark column of smoke into the sky. Amid the chaos, some of the men help prisoners held at the station break out, bursting through the barred windows and helping them shimmy down the building’s drainpipes to freedom.
The scene was reminiscent of a string of jailbreaks that accompanied the 2011 uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak, like one that freed Mohamed Morsi and other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood from a prison in Wadi Natroun. Mr. Morsi now stands accused of espionage by Egypt’s military rulers, who have accused him of conspiring with the Palestinian militant group Hamas to escape from prison.
But this station in Beni Suef was not the only one to burn on Wednesday, and there were reports of similar attacks in several neighborhoods and towns. One Twitter user, who appeared to be a supporter of Mr. Morsi, posted a picture to Twitter that he said showed a burning police station in Warraq, an area of Giza.
2:25 P.M. Daughter of Muslim Brotherhood Leader Killed in Cairo
The 17-year-old daughter of a prominent Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohamed al-Beltagy, was shot dead on Wednesday as security forces stormed a pro-Morsi protest camp in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adaweya square, the group said in a statement. The Brotherhood said the girl, Asmaa al-Beltagy, was shot in the back and the chest with live ammunition.
Mr. Beltagy mentioned his daughter’s death during an emotional interview with BBC Arabic Service, calling her “a martyr.” Video of his remarks was posted online by the independent Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm.
In the interview, Mr. Beltagy urged Egyptians to take to the streets “to end the military and police state and to stop the oppression that we lived under for 60 years, so that the Egyptian people can live with freedom and dignity and pride with their heads held high, without being slapped on the back of the head.”
The Associated Press reported later that Mr. Beltagy was among several prominent Brotherhood leaders arrested after the attack on the protest camps, along with Essam El-Erian and Safwat Hegazy, a hardline cleric seen as a Brotherhood ally. The three men stand accused of inciting violence and conspiring to kill anti-Morsi protesters, officials told The A.P.
2:22 P.M. Egyptian Photographer’s Account of Raid on Protesters
Apologies for the technical difficulties that prevented us from updating the blog for a while, but we will try to bring you now some of the most important photographs, video and accounts of Wednesday’s events in Egypt posted online by witnesses.
The photographer Tara Todras-Whitehill, who shot a time-lapse video of the protest camp near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Cairo for The Times last week, took this overhead shot of the area after the raid.
Just as he was during the last large-scale killings of Islamist protesters in Cairo, in the same location three weeks ago, the Egyptian photographer Mosa’ab Elshamy was on hand Wednesday to document the raid on the the protest camp. As events unfolded, he posted updates and images of the violence on Twitter.
Although his equipment was stolen as he made his way out of the battle zone, he managed to smuggle out an SD card filled with images of the violence, which he later uploaded to Flickr.
Mr. Elshamy reported later that his brother, an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent, was arrested while working at the camp.
11:02 A.M. The Sound of Gunfire Caught on Video From Cairo
The independent Egyptian journalist Sharif Kouddous, reporting from the scene of the deadly raid on the protest camp near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Cairo’s Nasr City district, captured the sound of gunshots being fired at protesters in video he posted on YouTube.
Mr. Kouddous also shot extremely graphic images of the dead and the wounded inside the Rabaa medical center.
10:33 A.M. Counting the Dead in Cairo
Journalists and rights workers in Cairo, including our colleagues Kareem Fahim and Mayy El Sheikh, have been trying to count the dead after attacks on two sit-ins, at Nahda Square near Cairo University and around the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in the northeastern suburb of Nasr City, where they found wounded and dead protesters with bullet wounds and found that police snipers were shooting at people trying to make their way to the hospital.
Shortly after she left the area, Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch posted images of the frantic scramble to save badly wounded protesters inside the Rabaa Medical Center.
Graphic images of the wounded and the dead were posted on Twitter by Alastair Beach of London’s Independent and the Egyptian photographer Mosa’ab Elshamy.
Several journalists, including Mr. Elshamy, Mike Giglio of The Daily Beast and Kristen Chick of The Christian Science Monitor, reported that they were attacked or harassed by the security forces or anti-Islamist vigilantes as they tried to work on Wednesday. At least two journalists, including a cameraman for Britain’s Sky News, were reportedly killed during the assault on the protest camps.
10:08 A.M. State of Emergency Declared in Egypt
Amid varying reports of how many Islamist protesters have been killed by the security forces in Cairo, and reports of attacks on Christian churches, a one-month state of emergency has just come into force in Egypt, according to journalists and rights workers monitoring state television.