A sea of protesters flooded downtown Cairo yesterday, brushing aside limited concessions by President Hosni Mubarak and vowing to bring down his regime through strikes and a million-strong march.
In what is seen as a sop to the protesters, a new Cabinet line-up was announced in which widely hated interior minister Habib al-Adly as well as the finance and culture ministers of the previous Cabinet were axed.
But protesters massed in downtown Cairo insisted they would only be satisfied when Mr Mubarak quits, and vowed to step up their efforts to topple his creaking regime.
Organisers announced an indefinite strike and said that today would see a “march of a million” in the Egyptian capital after a week of revolt in which at least 125 people have been killed.
Tens of thousands of protesters yesterday carpeted Cairo’s Tahrir square, the epicentre for those calling for an end to the corruption, deprivation and police oppression indelibly associated with Mr Mubarak’s 30-year rule.
“We will stay in the square, until the coward leaves,” the crowd chanted.
The army has positioned tanks around the area and was checking identity papers but letting protesters in. Civilian popular committee members were also checking papers to make sure no plainclothes police get in.
“We are looking for police trouble makers, they want to come in and break our unity,” said a popular committee member who asked not to be named.
Nearby, soldiers scrubbed furiously at their tanks in a bid to wash off some of the anti-Mubarak graffiti they have been covered in over the last three days, as officers looked on.
Eid Mohammed, one of the protesters and organisers, said: “It was decided overnight that there will be a million man march today. We have also decided to begin an open-ended general strike.”
The strike was first called by workers at a factory in the canal city of Suez late on Sunday.
But faced with untold numbers potentially trying to converge on the capital, authorities stopped all train traffic with immediate effect from yesterday afternoon.
State-owned national carrier EgyptAir said it was cancelling all domestic and international flights from 3 p.m. (1300 GMT) to 8 a.m. (0600 GMT) until further notice, coinciding with a curfew in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez.
Some flight times will be changed to take into account the curfew, the airline said in a statement.
Faced with the biggest protests of his Presidency, an increasingly embattled Mr Mubarak appointed his first ever vice President and a new Prime Minister in a desperate attempt to hold on to power.
The new Cabinet unveiled yesterday did little to placate the protesters but the departure of Mr Adly, who controls Egypt’s notorious security forces who are accused of systematic human rights violations, was welcomed.
Meanwhile, some hotels in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh have put up barricades for protection against the potential spread of violent protests in Egypt, British Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt said yesterday.
Mr Burt said the situation in the area was “genuinely calm” but hotels had taken precautions because their guests were “slightly alarmed”.
A large majority of the 30,000 UK nationals in Egypt are in the Red Sea coastal resorts.