Supporters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood stormed and torched a government building in Cairo yesterday, while families tried to identify hundreds of mutilated bodies piled in a mosque a day after they were shot dead by security forces.

Egypt’s health ministry says 578 people were killed and thousands wounded in the worst day of civil violence in the modern history of the most populous Arab state.

Brotherhood supporters say the death toll is far higher, with hundreds of bodies as yet uncounted by the authorities, whose troops and police crushed protests seeking the return of deposed President Mohamed Morsi.

Some 228 bodies arranged in rows in the Al-Imam mosque, in Cairo

State TV quoted the Interior Ministry saying security forces would again use live ammunition to counter attacks against themselves or public buildings.

International condemnation rained down on Cairo’s military-backed rulers for ordering the storming of pro-Morsi protest camps after dawn on Wednesday, six weeks after the army overthrew the country’s first freely elected leader.

The Maltese Government has not issued any travel warnings about Egypt but Foreign Affairs Minister George Vella said the Maltese should not fly to the country unless it was unavoidable.

A source in the Maltese Embassy in Egypt told Times of Malta that all Maltese nationals in Egypt were safe.

“The various airports are functioning normally and the tourist areas on the Red Sea are considered safe,” the source said.

Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama cancelled plans for upcoming military exercises with the Egyptian army, which Washington funds with $1.3 billion in annual aid.

“The United States strongly condemns the steps that have been taken by Egypt’s interim government and security forces,” Obama said in an address from his vacation home on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard.

“We deplore violence against civilians. We support universal rights essential to human dignity, including the right to peaceful protest.”

Obama’s defence secretary Chuck Hagel later warned Egypt’s army chief that “the violence and inadequate steps towards reconciliation are putting important elements of our longstanding defence cooperation at risk”.

Western diplomats have said that senior US and European officials had been in contact with Egypt’s rulers until the final hour, pleading with them not to order a military crackdown on the protest camps, where thousands of Morsi’s followers had been camped out since before he was toppled by the present regime.

There were further reports of more prot-ests yesterday but no repeat of the previous day’s bloodbath.

In Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, hundreds of demonstrators marched, chanting: “We will come back again for the sake of our martyrs!”

Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Haddad said anger within the 85-year-old Islamist movement, which has millions of supporters across Egypt, was “beyond control”.

“After the blows and arrests and killings that we are facing, emotions are too high to be guided by anyone,” he said.

The Brotherhood called on followers to march in Cairo later yesterday, while funeral processions for those who died provide further potential flashpoints over the coming days. In Cairo, Reuters counted 228 bodies, mostly wrapped in white shrouds, on the floor of the Al-Imam mosque in northeast Cairo, close to the worst of the violence.

The mosque had been converted into a charnel house, resembling the aftermath of a World War I battlefield.

People gather outside a government building after it was set ablaze in Cairo’s Giza district yesterday. Photo: Reuters