Hundreds of Sudanese have been released from police detention camps onto the streets of this city with no money, no place to live -- and in many cases, no shoes -- three days after riot police attacked a squatter camp set up as a protest to press the UN to relocate the migrants to another country.
The walled-in courtyard of Sacred Heart Church here was packed on Monday with men and women searching for a blanket, a meal, a place to live, word of a lost relative, anything that might help rebuild a life after the police charged their camp on Friday. The attack officially left 26 dead, including seven small children, and many others injured.
"It is a terrible situation," said the Reverend Simon Mbuthia, a priest at Sacred Heart, a Catholic church, as he considered the crowd of people looking for help.
"The government here has done nothing," he said.
Abdul Aziz Muhammad Ahmed, 29, sat shivering on the steps just beneath the metal door leading to Mbuthia's offices.
"I'm not sick," he said through a far-off gaze. "My daughter, Asma, was killed."
Asma was 9 months old, and her uncle said he dropped her when the police clubbed him.
"I haven't told my wife yet," Ahmed said. "She is already sick."
The government waited for three months before sending the police out to empty the squatter camp, in one of Cairo's more upscale neighborhoods.
The police yelled at squatters through bullhorns, ordering them to leave, and used water cannon when they refused. After the Sudanese remained defiant, the police attacked.
So many were left dead, and the international condemnation was so embarrassing, that President Hosni Mubarak has told the attorney general to investigate.
But the government's official position is that the Sudanese were to blame. Magdy Rady, the government's chief spokesman, said that the Sudanese injured their own people by trampling those who collapsed, and he said they also attacked the police, injuring more than 70 officers.
The Sudanese were unarmed and many were barefoot. The police were wearing riot gear, including helmets with face shields, and wielded truncheons.
"We are sorry," Rady said.
"What happened is unfortunate, it is sad, but it was not the intention of the police. The Sudanese pushed us to do this. They do not want even to settle in Egypt. They want to move to another country. We did not know what else to do. It was a very difficult situation," he added.
After clearing the park, the police took all of the Sudanese, about 3,000, to detention camps where they were asked for identification papers. Those with passports or UN documents allowing them to be in Egypt were being released.
Those without documents, or those who had twice been denied refugee status by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, would probably be sent back to Sudan, Rady said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS