Riot police are spreading tear gas and firing rubber bullets as the crowd of stone-throwing protesters at Egypt’s Tahrir Square begins to swell. RT’s Paula Slier reports from Cairo that the situation on the ground remains extremely tense.
Some of the rubber bullets have gone astray, hitting residential buildings nearby and starting fires. Paula has encountered at least a dozen ambulances and a fire brigade quickly responding.
The crowd surrounded the RT crew and started yelling and screaming, asking who they were. As Paula was walking to her LIVE broadcast position she crossed through the center of Tahrir Square. Quite a few people came up to her and quickly hurried her to the side, advising her that, with a clearly foreign face, it is very dangerous to be in the square for the moment.
People who left in the early hours of Monday morning to go home to have some sleep and food are returning.
The sense Paula gets from the mood of the crowd is that there is going to be more violence, but much depends on how the police and security forces respond.
Paula spoke to some of the protesters, who say that they are ready for whatever happens.
There are very few women there, most of the people are young men, extremely angry and incredibly frustrated. Many are walking around wearing bandages, showing the effect of Sunday’s violence which left 20 people dead and more than a thousand people injured, according to the country's Health Ministry.
Monday's clashes are also taking place near the Interior Ministry, which is close to Tahrir Square.
A shocking video has been released in the internet showing the violent crackdown of police and security during the protests over the weekend.
Mint Western Munition Killing Cairo Protesters Egyptian political activist Ahmed Salah does not expect a swift reaction by the West on the latest events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, as he says these countries have supplied the army regime with the means of oppression.
“I am not expecting a quick reaction from the West. We can see that all the ammunition used against us is either American, or Israeli, or, actually, Italian, whether it’s the tear-gas canisters or the bullets,” he told RT. “All the ammunition that they have received is [from] 2011. It’s post-revolution, presumably.”
Now, he says, this very ammunition is used to empower the government by killing civilians and suppressing the revolution.
“I don’t know what can be the excuse for giving the armed forces and the security this type of ammunition. That’s why we have thousands of injured,” he said. “They don’t care about the injured. They’ve just stormed a hospital a while ago with tear gas and everything in an attempt to retake the square. The whole world had probably seen on television how they were setting property on fire – vehicles, motorbikes and shops, like they did last night – in order to [blame] us and the revolution that we are the ones doing the sabotage.”
Ahmed Salah particularly pointed out that the present dramatic events taking place on Tahrir Square should be regarded as the very same revolution that had toppled the country’s former president Hosni Mubarak.
“We were cheated into believing that the revolution was over, we succeeded, we managed to overthrow the Mubarak regime. This was all wrong,” he said. “The Mubarak regime is still in power. It is fighting back. The same corrupt regime is out there, only cheating us, the population and the world, into believing that they are going to start this transition towards democracy, while everything they are doing was to conspire [about staying] in power.”
The clashes in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square have been ongoing since Friday. The violence began when riot police attacked around 200 peaceful demonstrators, who had camped out in the square overnight in order to commemorate protesters killed in the February uprising. The violence comes nine days before Egypt's first elections since the ousting of President Mubarak. Source UPDATES: