Egyptian protesters on open strike, threaten escalation

Thousands of Egyptians Saturday went on an open strike in Cairo and other big cities, threatening escalation if the country’s military rulers did not expedite the prosecution of former government officials.

‘We give the country’s rulers until Sunday night to declare public, real and swift trials for the officials of the toppled regime and the killers of martyrs,’ the protest group the Second Revolution of Rage said on its Facebook page.

‘If not, there will be escalatory measures, including a call for civil disobedience,’ it added.

The protesters are disappointed at what they say is the slow pace of bringing former president Hosny Mubarak, toppled in a popular uprising in February, and other officials to justice.

On Friday Egypt saw mass protests nationwide demanding that former officials, believed to be involved in a deadly crackdown on demonstrators during the anti-Mubarak revolt, be tried quickly and in public.

The protesters are also pushing for state institutions, mainly the police, to be purged of those deemed loyal to Mubarak.

At least 846 people were killed and more than 6,000 injured in the uprising, according to a fact-finding commission.

Spanish government gives green light for Salem’s extradition

At its weekly meeting on Friday, the Spanish government gave the green light to approve Egypt’s request to extradite businessman Hussein Salem, who holds Egyptian and Spanish nationalities.

This came at the request of the Spanish Minister of Justice Francisco Caamaño, who recommended pressing ahead with the extradition.

Egypt gave Spain three guarantees: that Salem will be tried fairly, that representatives from the Spanish judicial authority will be allowed to attend the hearings in Cairo, and that Salem will not be sentenced to death, as illicit gains is not a crime punishable by death in Egypt.

According to informed sources, the Spanish government’s approval is an essential step in extradition proceedings, as it obligates the Spanish judiciary, represented by Spain’s National Court, to hand Salem over to the Egyptian government.

Meanwhile, an Egyptian source asserted that “the Spanish government is cooperating with us by all means, and they have no objection to [Salem's] extradition if there are no legal obstacles. But judiciary obstacles still exist, as [Salem] is a Spanish national, and he is accused of committing crimes in Spain – therefore he should be punished for them first.”

The source added that Salem will not be handed over now because the judicial process has not yet started, and so far Salem has only been placed under house arrest.

Magdy al-Shafie, director general of Egyptian Interpol, said by Friday night Egyptian authorities had not yet received an official response from Spain regarding Salem’s handover, and he is still under arrest in a hospital there.

“The Egyptian authorities follow Salem’s case with great interest through the Foreign Ministry and our embassy in Spain, and Attorney General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud is also following it up through the Department of International Cooperation,” he added.

He said the decision to hand over Salem would be taken by the Spanish judiciary, which has the right to reject or accept Egypt’s request. He said the file Egypt sent to the Spanish authorities contains a lot of evidence to support the case for extradition.

Salem is currently under arrest at Gregorio Marañón hospital after a Spanish court set a huge bail for him, amounting to 27 million euros.

Hundreds spend the night in Cairo’s Tahrir Square

Hundreds of protesters spent the night in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, an AFP reporter said on Saturday, after mass nationwide rallies to press the new military rulers to make good on promises of reform.

Dozens of tents were pitched in the square — the focus of protests that ousted veteran president Hosni Mubarak in February — and traffic was blocked around the usually busy plaza where music blasted from loudspeakers.

Pro-democracy activists who had handled security at Friday’s mass rally, were still guarding the entrances to the square, searching anyone walking in.

Among the key demands raised at Friday’s protests were an end to military trials of civilians, the dismissal and prosecution of police officers accused of killing protesters, and thorough and transparent trials for former regime officials.

Activists have repeatedly denounced the handling of legal proceedings against security forces who used violence in the uprising that killed 846 civilians.

“We need to change the ministry of interior and the police. Police must respect everybody in this country,” said Mohammed Karim, a law student at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.

Mussa Assem, another protester who spent the night in Tahrir, echoed a key demand of the activists which is to remove former regime officials from senior positions in state institutions.

“Five months after the revolution, we still have to continue the movement,” he told AFP.

“We want the removal of former regime people who are still in charge in the media,” he said.

Tens of thousands had taken to the streets across Egypt on Friday to defend the uprising, directing their anger at the army which took power when the strongman stepped down.

The day passed without major incident as the protesters listened to speeches and songs through loudspeakers at the well-stewarded rally in Tahrir Square. Security forces maintained a discreet presence nearby.

Thousands of protesters also came out in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and the canal cities of Suez and Ismailiya.

Hundreds protested outside a hospital in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, where Mubarak is detained on charges of fraud and ordering the killing of protesters during the uprising.

Egypt’s gas pipeline a target for anger at Israel, Mubarak

For 30 years, the Bedouin tribes of the Sinai Peninsula threatened to bomb the pipeline that carries natural gas from Egypt’s fields to Israel, which they still consider a mortal enemy. But they never did, at least not while Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was in power.

In the 20 weeks since Mubarak’s fall, however, the pipeline has been bombed three times, most recently on Monday. No one expects that will be the last time.

Not only is the pipeline the visible symbol of Egypt’s unpopular peace treaty with Israel, but there also appears to be no real plan or effort to protect it.

“Even if you appoint local tribesmen or anyone to guard such a facility, no one would really protect it because they hate the facility, the gas supply to the enemy and the government that signed such an agreement,” said Sheikh Ibrahim Abu Elayan, the secretary-general of the Arab Tribes Association. “This agreement is a dagger in Egypt’s heart.”

Monday’s explosion rocked a control room at the gas pipeline’s facility in the town of Bir El Abd, a Bedouin stronghold. A second bomb planted in a different control room failed to detonate, and Egyptian military bomb technicians dismantled it and took it away as evidence.

A visit to the site this week found security to be laughable.

Under an agreement that the military reached with the Bedouin tribes after Mubarak fell, only Bedouins can guard the pipeline’s control rooms. But the guards – three per control room – aren’t allowed to carry firearms. Their guard posts in the desert are little more than lean-tos made of plastic sheeting and palm fronds, without water or toilets. There’s not a hint of such state-of-the-art monitoring as closed-circuit television or night-vision goggles.

When whoever set Monday’s bombs approached the facilities, the guards were cooking. They say they never saw a thing.

“The attackers parked their cars almost a kilometer away in the desert and came in crawling,” said one of the guards, who refused to give his name but whose colleagues called him Dawaghri, after his tribe, the Dawaghra. “We found their tracks in the morning.”

Based on those tracks, Dawaghri and his colleagues concluded that there’d been eight attackers. Dawaghri expressed no surprise that the bombers had been able to enter the control rooms, plant the bombs and slip away without being detected.

“At night there is no light except for our cooking fire,” he said. “A few meters away from that, you will never see your hands.”

Guarding the pipeline pays poorly, about $100 a month, but the six guards on the morning shift Tuesday agreed that there were no other employment options.

“It’s a bitter pill,” said one who called himself Bayadi, after his tribe, the Bayadeya.

The gas deal and the pipeline have long been unpopular here. Nearly all the heads of the Sinai tribes, who still recall decades of fighting Israel, have denounced it. Still, under the post-Mubarak agreement with the military, it’s fallen to local tribesmen to protect it.

And while the Bedouin guards don’t carry firearms, weapons are plentiful here. Almost any weapon can be purchased, according to a local arms dealer, who made it clear that he didn’t want his name in a news story. “If you mention my name it will hurt me and I will have to hurt you,” he said to a reporter.

“Money can get you anything,” he said. “A machine gun costs you $2,600 to $3,000. An RPG” – rocket-propelled grenade – “costs $2,600 for the firing tube and $1,000 more for each shell.”

Mubarak is discussed here with almost the same fury as Israel. When unrest swept Egypt before Mubarak was forced from office, every police station in northern Sinai was burned to the ground, often after unknown assailants had attacked them with rocket-propelled grenades and other weaponry.

The Mubarak era is openly referred to as an occupation, not much different from the 14 years when Israeli forces ruled here, before Israel returned the Sinai as part of the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt.

The military-led caretaker government also earns little respect. Tribal leaders have made it clear that they won’t accept any police presence in the area until the government has prosecuted and punished Mubarak-era officials they think are responsible for the deaths of protesters during the anti-government chaos of January and February.

“There is a great security gap, not to mention the hatred that accumulated for years toward the police due to their injustice and brutality,” said Sheikh Abdalla Jahama, the head of the Sinai Fighters Association, an association of resistance fighters formed after the last war with Israel, in 1973.

Jahama said he doubted that outside forces were responsible for the bombing: It would be too hard for foreign terrorists to penetrate the Sinai’s tight-knit tribal circles. But that doesn’t mean that terrorist groups might not try to hire local tribesmen to attack the pipeline.

“It could be extremist Islamists, Palestinians or al-Qaida, but they must have had a local with them. They cannot commit such a crime without local help,” he said.

The Egyptian National Gas Co., known as GASCO, called the damage from the bombing minor and said it would be repaired in a few days.

“It was very unsophisticated,” said Sobhy Mohamed, a pipeline technician who was leading the repair work.

The real cost is to businesses and other industries that will be without gas service for several days, not just in Israel, but also in the Sinai and Jordan, which also receives gas through the pipeline.

It almost certainly will happen again.

“The pipeline is always left unsecured. Anyone can attack it anytime,” Jahama said.

Egypt protesters demand ‘civil marriage’

Dozens of Egyptians protested on Thursday to demand the introduction of civil marriages, in order to be able to divorce or remarry.

Protesters — Coptic Christians as well as Muslims — want the next parliament elected in September to adopt a law to to allow civil marriages.

Currently, Egyptians follow the law of their religion when it comes to marriage and divorce.

The Coptic church only allows divorce in very exceptional circumstances, forcing some to resort to convert to Islam to obtain a legal separation.

Muslim women are not allowed to marry Christian men, unless they convert to Islam.

Today civil marriages are limited to Egyptians marrying foreigners.

Cases of conversion have sparked tensions, and even clashes between both communities.

“It usually starts with a personal problem and then transforms into a major problem,” said Karima Kamal, author of the book “The Coptic Divorce.”

On May 7 clashes erupted in the working-class neighbourhood of Imbaba, an overcrowded maze of residential buildings and shops, that left 12 dead and 52 injured.

Muslims had attacked the Coptic Saint Mena church in Imbaba in a bid to free a Christian woman they alleged was being held against her will because she wanted to convert to Islam.

But a week later, the young woman at the centre of the clashes, Abeer Talaat Fakhry, was arrested and charged with polyandry.

She was living with her Christian husband in the southern city of Assiut when she ran away from home, converted to Islam and “married” a Muslim.

There have been a number of cases in which unhappy women have left their husbands, converted to Islam and “married” Muslims, but those marriages are not recognised in law.

Coptic Christians, who account for up to 10 percent of Egypt’s 80-million people, complain of discrimination and have been the target of numerous attacks over the years.

Million-person protest called in Tahrir Square

Egypt is braced for mass demonstrations after opposition activists called for a million-person protest on Friday.

Thousands of protesters have begun gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir Square – focus of February’s uprising – to demand speedier reforms.

They particularly want to see ousted President Hosni Mubarak and his officials put on trial more quickly.

There were riots this week over a court decision to bail policemen accused of killing 17 people during the uprising.

People began arriving in Tahrir Square throughout the night to pitch their tents. They were even directing traffic in place of the police who had agreed to stay away to avoid confrontation.

A security official told the AFP news agency that police and army officers would be stationed in the side streets but would not be present on the square itself.

Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement said it would attend the protest.

“The law is above everyone, and justice has to prevail on all people, young and old,” the group’s Mahmoud Ghzolan said.

Ministers acquitted

Official figures show that at least 846 people died and 6,000 more were injured in the 18-day uprising during January and February.

Since then, only one policeman has been convicted in more than a dozen court cases over the crackdown on protesters, the AP news agency reports. He was tried in absentia.

And on Tuesday, a Cairo court acquitted three ministers from the Mubarak regime who had been charged with squandering public funds.

The decision to release on bail seven policemen accused of killing 17 protesters sparked riots in both Cairo and Suez this week.

Activists are also concerned that the 83-year-old former president remains in a regular hospital, with no date yet set for a court appearance for either him, his sons or his senior officials.

But, says the BBC’s John Leyne, other Egyptians are opposed to the continuing protests and just want a return to normality, law and order and the revival of the economy.

Muslim Brotherhood to join Friday protest

Egypt’s best-organised political group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said Wednesday it would join mass rallies Friday aimed at pushing for faster reforms and swift punishment for allies of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

Activists complain that recent events, including the use of force by police against demonstrators, court rulings that cleared three ministers in Mubarak’s administration of graft as well as the release of some police officers accused of killing protesters, went against reforms.

The Brotherhood participation is likely to bolster what is billed as a million-person protest, called for by secular activists unhappy with the way the ruling military council has been running the country.

Several top activists have criticized the Brotherhood for taking a back seat during the January 25 revolution that ousted Mubarak and labeling protesters who tried to organize further sit-ins in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in March and April as “thugs.”

The Brotherhood initially said it intended to boycott the rallies when the protest’s goal was to pressure the military council to delay parliamentary elections scheduled for September.

“Then there were new developments on the subject that necessitated putting it for debate once more,” the Brotherhood said in a statement posted on its website.

It cited a change in the objectives of the protest organizers in which they dropped their demand to delay the elections, the grievances raised by families of Egyptians killed in the revolution and the foot-dragging in trying Mubarak supporters.

In a referendum in March, 77 percent of voters said they backed constitutional amendments that would allow the country’s military rulers to hold parliamentary elections in September.

Analysts have said a tight timetable for the elections gives new parties little time to prepare and build up support against the Islamist group that has a grass-roots network, financial muscle and broad appeal in a country with conservative Muslim values.

Foreign investors say they have been holding back from returning to Egypt because of the fragile security situation and political instability in the country before planned elections to return the country to civilian rule in September.

Charges against ex-ministers dropped

Cairo’s Criminal Court issued a judicial order on Tuesday acquitting three former ministers of corruption charges. The court ordered that the charges against Anas El-Fiqi, Youssef Boutros Ghali and Ahmed El-Maghrabi, the former ministers of information, finance and housing respectively, be dropped. El-Fiqi and Boutros Ghali had been accused of diverting LE36 million from the state treasury to be spent on media campaigns for ousted Hosni Mubarak’s now defunct National Democratic Party (NDP).

El-Maghrabi, a former chairman of the real estate developer Palm Hills, was judged not guilty of illegally profiteering from the sale of state-owned land. Palm Hills current chairman, Yassin Mansour, fled Egypt after several complaints were filed against him.

Prosecution authorities had accused Mansour, El-Maghrabi and Ahdi Fadli, the former board chairman of Akhbar Al-Youm Press Organisation, of manipulating the sale of 113 feddans of land in 6 October City in favour of Palm Hills. Fadli was cleared by the court of the charges.

Former trade minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid has been sentenced in absentia to five years in prison for profiteering and squandering public funds. In another case, the ex-minister who fled the country during the political turmoil in late January and February received a five year sentence on 25 June after being found guilty of embezzling LE9.5 million from a fund that was established to promote Egyptian exports. Rachid offered to refund the LE9.5 in return for an amnesty from prosecution.

On 4 June Youssef Boutros Ghali received a 30-year prison sentence when he was tried on corruption charges in absentia. The government has asked Interpol to arrest Ghali, who is thought to be living in London.

Prosecutor-General Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud has appealed the most recent order from Cairo Criminal Court. Prosecution spokesman Adel-El-Said says, “the prosecutor’s office believes that the judicial orders were unfair and that corruption charges levelled against the three former ministers are well-documented.”

In May former interior minister Habib El-Adli was sentenced to 12 years in jail on corruption charges. Former tourism minister Zoheir Garana and housing minister Ahmed El-Maghrabi both received five year sentences.

Activists are demanding that former officials from Mubarak’s regime face speedier trials and are planning a mass rally in Tahrir Square tomorrow to press their demands. They are concerned that senior police officers who are alleged to have opened fire on pro-democracy protesters at Tahrir Square during the 25 January revolution remain free.

Meanwhile, a small crowd gathered in front of the Spanish embassy on 1 July to demand the extradition to Egypt of businessman Hussein Salem. Salem is a close friend of ousted president Hosni Mubarak and is believed to have been involved in many dubious business deals, including arms sales.

The trial of Salem, Mubarak and his two sons Alaa and Gamal, is scheduled to open on 3 August. All four face charges of illegally profiteering from selling natural gas to Israel at subsidised prices. Prosecution authorities claim Salem made $2 billion from the deal.

Salem, his son and a Turkish associate were arrested in Spain on 16 June. He is being questioned in connection with a money-laundering case in Spain.

Mubarak and his two sons are accused of helping Salem monopolise gas sales in return for kick-backs, including properties in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.

During a press conference on 30 June the Spanish ambassador in Cairo said that Salem could be handed over to Egypt if it is shown that he holds dual nationality, which is not allowed under Spanish law. The ambassador said that, “Salem had given up his Egyptian nationality when he acquired Spanish nationality”.

“He was granted Spanish nationality after he had stayed in Spain for ten years, the period required by Spanish law. Investigations are ongoing into whether there were any infringements of the due process.”

The prosecutor-general’s office forwarded documents to the Spanish government on 17 June detailing charges against Salem, including a copy of his Egyptian passport which Salem used between 2005 and 2011 in violation of Spanish laws prohibiting dual citizenship.

Spain has frozen $47 million of assets held by Salem and his relatives in Salem and seized homes worth $14 million. Bail was set at ê27 million.

Four die in Cairo bridge collapse

Four Egyptians workers reportedly died early Tuesday after part of a bridge under construction collapsed in the Cairo suburb of Maadi, a medical source said.

Two of the bodies have been recovered from the Nile River and the search is still going on for the other two bodies.

The to bodies have been moved to the a nearby hospital morgue while the rescue teams are looking for the remaining two workers.

Local reports mentioned that the families of the deceased have gathered around the site expressing their anger, but no injuries have been reported.

Egypt’s poor infrastructure has led to numerous deaths in recent years as bridges and buildings have collapsed across the country.

Industry experts have long called on the Egyptian government to move faster in increasing security and overall infrastructure efforts in the country in an effort to stem the rising human toll of construction.

Plane breaking sound barrier causes panic in Cairo

A sonic boom over Cairo has caused jitters around the capital where many residents called emergency services to report what they thought were explosions.

State television reported Wednesday that an airplane breaking the sound barrier was the cause of loud booms that shook buildings over large parts of the city of 18 million. Sonic booms are rare in Cairo.

Egypt has been in turmoil since the uprising that ousted longtime leader Hosni Mubarak in February. There have since been sporadic protests, riots, clashes and a marked deterioration in security with fewer police on the streets.

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