Friday calmest of eleven days of anti-government unrest in Egypt
CAIRO. February 5. KAZINFORM Friday, which many had expected would become the last day of President Mubarak's rule, proved the calmest in Egypt since the beginning of massive anti-government protests on January 25; Kazinform refers to Itar-Tass.
Friday's "day of anger" saw no big disturbances, except for some minor incidents - no clashes between supporters of different trends, no gunfights, no hunts for journalists. Throughout the day hundreds of thousands of protesters stood peacefully in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. Sporadic calls for marching towards the presidential palace did not receive support.
The day would have ended like many other ones, without anything special to remember, but for the emergence of several important figures before the crowd. Shortly after the midday prayer Defense Minister Hussein al-Tantawi, accompanied by high-ranking military commanders, went to talk to the people. Among the protesters in Tahrir Square there stood shoulder to shoulder representatives of the intellectuals - well-known actors and singers, college and university professors, academics, lawyers, authors - and the poor, workers, garbage men and jobless. They all were demanding one thing - the immediate resignation of the president.
Then in the square there appeared a man who in the future may play a significant role in the presidential race - the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. The office of this major inter-Arab organization is just a hundred meters from the center of events. The day before Mousa first publicly announced his intentions to run in the presidential election.
According to official statistics available from the Ministry of Health, in the center of Cairo one week of confrontation between supporters and opponents of the regime left eleven people dead and five thousand injured. On Friday, the death toll grew, when a correspondent for Al-Ahram, injured while covering the events on January 29, died of wounds. He was the first media worker to have lost his life in the violence. How many people exactly were killed in the unrest the erupted in Egypt after the January 25 events will become clear much later. And how many more pieces of video evidence of the Egyptian tragedies of these days will appear on the Internet is anyone's guess.
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