Protesters return to streets in Egypt over prisoner deaths
Crowds gather in several areas to demand investigation into deaths of 38 detainees in police custody
Angry protesters took to the streets of Egypt Monday evening to demand an international investigation into the deaths of dozens of prisoners while in police custody a day earlier.
Crowds formed in Helwan in Cairo, as well as Assiut, Zagazig and Gharbia, while troops backed up by armored personnel carriers were deployed at government buildings in the capital, al-Jazeera reported.
Hours earlier, the Anti-coup Alliance, which includes the Muslim Brotherhood among its members, called for a probe into how 38 prisoners being transported in police vans died on Sunday.
The prisoners were part of a prison truck convoy of some 600 detainees heading to Abu Zaabal prison in northern Egypt, the officials told The Associated Press. Detainees in one of the trucks rioted and managed to capture a police officer inside, the officials said.
Security forces fired tear gas into the truck in hopes of freeing the badly beaten officer inside, the officials said. The officials said those killed died from suffocating on the gas.
Street protests have mostly died down after several bloody days, which saw over 800 people killed in clashes between supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian forces, touched off when police stormed two sit-ins of anti-coup protesters in Cairo.
On Sunday, a number of anti-military marches were called off over “security concerns,” organizers said, while thousands of people around Cairo protested against the coup with a few incidents of violence.
The military has sought to crack down on the Brotherhood, carrying out sweeping raids on members throughout the country, and the Cabinet in Cairo has said it will discuss re-outlawing the group, which climbed to power in 2012 following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak.
Attention mostly shifted to the Sinai on Monday, after 25 police were killed in a rocket attack in the north of the peninsula near the border with Gaza, in what officials said was a terror attack. The military has sought to clamp down on al-Qaeda-linked terror by jihadists in the Sinai, which are seen as linked to the Islamist Brotherhood.