Egyptian security forces crushed a protest camp of thousands of supporters of the deposed president yesterday, shooting dead scores of people in the bloodiest day in decades in the Arab world’s biggest country.
At the time of going to press, the health ministry said 149 people were killed, both in Cairo and in clashes that broke out elsewhere in the country.
Deposed President Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood said the death toll was far higher in what it described as a “massacre”.
Forty-three members of Egypt’s police force were killed, the interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim said at a televised news conference after the security forces moved to break up two sit-ins by Morsi supporters. He said the two protest camps in Cairo had been completely cleared.
As dead bodies wrapped in carpets were carried to a makeshift morgue near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque, the army-backed rulers declared a one-month state of emergency, restoring to the military the unfettered power it wielded for decades before a pro-democracy uprising in 2011.
Thousands of Morsi’s supporters had been camped at two major sites in Cairo since before he was toppled on July 3, and had vowed not leave the streets until he was returned to power.
The beneficiaries of what happened today are those calling for violence, terrorism and the most extreme groups
Violence spread beyond the capital, with Morsi supporters and security forces clashing in the cities of Alexandria, Assiut, Fayoum and Suez and in Buhayra and Beni Suef provinces.
Forty-one people, including six policemen, were killed in the province of Minya some 200 km south of Cairo in violence ignited by the assault, Health Ministry officials said.
With the assault on the camps, the authorities ended a six-week stand-off with a show of state force that defied international pleas for restraint.
The bloodshed also effectively ends the open political role of the Brotherhood, which survived for 85 years as an underground movement before emerging from the shadows after the 2011 uprising to win every election held since.
In one a rare sign of unease from among the Brotherhood’s opponents, Mohamed ElBaradei, a former UN diplomat, quit his post of vice president in the government, saying the conflict could have been resolved by peaceful means.
“The beneficiaries of what happened today are those calling for violence, terrorism and the most extreme groups,” he said.
But Egypt’s interim prime minister defended the government’s decision to crush the camps, saying the authorities had no choice but to act.
“We found that matters had reached a point that no self-respecting state could accept,” Hazem el-Beblawi said, citing what he describes as “the spread of anarchy and attacks on hospitals and police stations”.
In a televised statement Beblawi said the decision to break up the protests “was not easy” and came only after the government had given mediation efforts a chance.
“God willing, we will continue. We will build our democratic, civilian state,” he said.
Since Morsi was toppled, the security forces had twice before killed scores of protesters in an attempt to drive Morsi’s followers off the streets.
But they had held back from a full-scale assault on the tented camp where followers and their families have lived behind makeshift barricades.
After the assault began, desperate residents recited Koranic verse and screamed “God help us! God help us!” while helicopters hovered overhead and armoured bulldozers ploughed over their makeshift defences.
Reuters journalists on the scene saw masked police in dark uniforms pour out of police vans with sticks and tear gas bombs. They tore down tents and set them ablaze.
“They smashed through our walls. Police and soldiers, they fired tear gas at children,” said Saleh Abdulaziz, 39, a secondary school teacher clutching a bleeding wound on his head.
After shooting with live ammunition began, wounded and dead lay on the streets near pools of blood. A former playground for the children of protesters was turned into a war-zone field hospital.
Seven dead bodies were lined up in the street, one of a teenager whose skull was smashed, with blood pouring from the back of his head.
At another location in Cairo, a Reuters reporter was in a crowd of Morsi supporters when he heard bullets whizzing past and hitting walls. The crowd dived to the ground for cover. A man was killed by a bullet to the head.
The bloodshed effectively ends the open political role of the Muslim Brotherhood
The government insists people in the camp were armed. Several television stations, all controlled by the state or its sympathisers, ran footage of what appeared to be pro-Morsi protesters firing rifles at soldiers from behind sandbag barricades.
However Reuters journalists and other Western media have not witnessed this. Crowds appeared to be armed mainly with sticks, stones and concrete slabs against rifle-wielding police and troops.
At a makeshift morgue at the camp field hospital, a Reuters reporter counted 29 bodies, with others still arriving. Most had died of gunshot wounds to the head.
A 12-year-old boy, bare-chested with tracksuit trousers, lay out in the corridor, a bullet wound through his neck. His mother was bent over him, rocking and silently kissing his chest. One of the nurses was sobbing on her hands and knees as she tried to mop up the blood with tissue.
The violence forces tough decisions for Egypt’s Western allies, especially Washington, which funds Egypt’s military with $1.3 billion a year and has refused to label Morsi’s overthrow a “coup”.
“The United States strongly condemns the use of violence against protesters in Egypt,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
“We extend our condolences to the families of those who have been killed, and to the injured. We have repeatedly called on the Egyptian military and security forces to show restraint.”
Mohamed El-Beltagi, Brotherhood leader, said his 17-year-old daughter had been killed in the clashes. Among the other dead were at least two journalists.
Turkey urged the UN and Arab League to act quickly to stop a “massacre” in Egypt. Iran warned of the risk of civil war. The EU and several member countries deplored the killings.