'Fearless' Egypt Islamists Rally in Defiance of Ban
A driverless bus careered down a Cairo street toward riot police, smashing into parked cars as the police scrambled to safety during a protest Friday in defiance of a ban.
The protesters, who were responding a call to demonstrate by an alliance that backs ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, had disengaged the handbrake on board the bus and turned the vehicle into a weapon.
Police in an armored van managed to reverse out of harm's way.
It was one of many defiant acts across Egypt on Friday as Morsi's supporters rallied in spite of a ban on demonstrations a week after the military-installed government declared his Muslim Brotherhood movement a "terrorist organization".
"Egyptians don't know fear," said Houeida, a protester who came with her husband and four children, moments before the clashes erupted in the Cairo neighborhood of Nasr City.
She brushed off the threat of a harsh prison term the Islamist protesters now face with the Brotherhood's designation as a terrorist group.
The move signaled the interim government's intent to crush the 85-year-old movement with a membership estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and an even larger support base.
The Brotherhood has organized almost daily protests since Morsi's ouster by the military on July 3, following days of massive street protests demanding the Islamist's resignation.
Since then, more than 1,000 people, mostly Islamists, have died in street clashes, and thousands have been imprisoned.
The crackdown, now bolstered by making Brotherhood membership punishable as a terrorist offence, has done little to intimidate the movement's diehard supporters, however.
"I'd rather die here, defending my rights, than die in my bed," said Houeida, her hair covered by a dark blue hijab.
Around her protesters chant against the "military coup" that toppled Morsi and against General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the military chief who is widely expected to stand in presidential elections this year.
"I am already old, but I am protesting today for the future generations," said her husband Alaa Aboul Ela.
"We lived more than 30 years under a dictatorship and I want to spare them this," he said, referring the era of Hosni Mubarak, the strongman ousted in a popular uprising in 2011.
For 19-year-old Sarah, a young protester who covered her face with a niqab, "the wall of fear that was inside us is now broken."
"Girls are not afraid anymore," she said.
The protesters in the march raised their hands in a four-finger salute, the symbol of a Cairo protest camp where hundreds were killed in clashes with police in August.
On Friday, the police, who have vowed to immediately disperse Brotherhood protests, opened fire all of a sudden, sending volleys of tear gas streaking down on the demonstrators.
Some of the protesters ran to the abandoned bus and disengaged its handbrake, sending it down the street at the panicked police.
Elsewhere in Cairo, in the southern suburb of Maadi, police fired tear gas and shotgun rounds at another rally.
"Make them run like chicken!" one officer yelled.
An Egyptian journalist urged an officer, a member of the special forces, to fire live ammunition.
"No, this is exactly what they want," he responded.
At least six protesters were killed in the clashes across Egypt on Friday, the health ministry said.
Source: Agence France Presse
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