Hundreds reported killed as Egypt crushes protests

British Prime Minister David Cameron called for “a genuine transition to a genuine democracy.”

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office called it “a serious blow to the hopes of a return to democracy.”

— Associated Press

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Officials said at least 235 people had been killed, plus 43 police officers, and more than 2,200 people had been injured, with numbers expected to rise.

Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and pro-reform leader in the interim government, resigned in protest of the violence.

Three journalists, including a cameraman for British broadcaster Sky News and a Dubai-based newspaper reporter, were killed and several were injured.

The government imposed a curfew over much of the country and declared a monthlong state of emergency.

— News services

In Egypt’s bloodiest day since the Arab Spring began, riot police Wednesday smashed two protest camps of supporters of the deposed Islamist president, touching off street violence that officials said killed nearly 300 people and forced the military-backed interim leaders to impose a state of emergency and curfew.

The crackdown drew widespread condemnation from the Muslim world and the West, including the U.S., and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei resigned as the interim vice president in protest — a blow to the new leadership’s credibility with the pro-reform movement.

“Today was a difficult day,” interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi said in a televised address to the nation. Although he said he regretted the bloodshed, he offered no apologies for moving against the supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi, saying they were given ample warnings to leave and he had tried foreign mediation efforts.

The leaders of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood called it a “massacre.” Several of them were detained as police swept through the two sit-in sites, scores of other Islamists were taken into custody, and the future of the once-banned movement was uncertain.

The Health Ministry said 235 civilians were killed and more than 2,000 injured, and Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim said 43 policemen died in the violence. The death toll was expected to rise.

Backed by helicopters, police fired tear gas and used armored bulldozers to plow into the barricades at the two protest camps in different sections of Cairo where the Morsi supporters had been camped since before he was ousted by the military July 3.

Army troops did not take part in the two operations, which began shortly after 7 a.m. local time, although they provided security at the locations.

The smaller camp — near Cairo University in Giza — was cleared of protesters relatively quickly, most taking refuge in the nearby Orman botanical gardens, on the campus of Cairo University and the zoo.

But it took about 12 hours for police to take control of the main sit-in site near the Rabaah al-Adawiya Mosque in Nasr City that has served as the epicenter of the pro-Morsi campaign and had drawn chanting throngs of men, women and children only days earlier.

After the police moved on the camps, street battles broke out in Cairo and other cities across Egypt. Government buildings and police stations were attacked, roads were blocked, and Christian churches were torched, Ibrahim said.

At one point, protesters trapped a police Humvee on an overpass near the Nasr City camp and pushed it off, according to images posted on social networking sites that showed an injured policeman on the ground below, near a pool of blood and the overturned vehicle.

Smoke clogged the sky above Cairo and fires smoldered on the streets, which were lined with charred poles and tarps after several tents were burned.

“Egypt has never witnessed such genocide,” Brotherhood spokesman Ahmed Aref said from the larger of the two protest camps before it was cleared.

The pro-Morsi Anti-Coup alliance alleged security forces used live ammunition, but the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of the police, said its forces only used tear gas and that they came under fire from the camp.

The government declared a monthlong nationwide state of emergency and imposed a nighttime curfew on Cairo, Alexandria and 12 other areas where violence broke out after the simultaneous raids.

It also ordered the armed forces to support the police in restoring law and order and protect state facilities. Egypt was under emergency law for most of Hosni Mubarak’s 29 years in power.

The turmoil was the latest chapter in a bitter standoff between Morsi’s supporters and the interim leadership that took over the Arab world’s most populous country. The military ousted Morsi after millions of Egyptians massed in the streets at the end of June to call for him to step down, accusing him of giving the Brotherhood undue influence and failing to implement vital reforms or bolster the ailing economy.

In his televised address, el-Beblawi said the government could not indefinitely tolerate a challenge to authority that the 6-week-old protests represented.

“We want to see a civilian state in Egypt, not a military state and not a religious state,” he said.

But the resignation of ElBaradei, the former head of the U.N. nuclear agency and a figure widely respected by Western governments, was the first crack to emerge in the government as a result of the violence.

“It has become difficult for me to continue to take responsibility for decisions I disapprove of, and I fear their consequences,” he said in his resignation letter to interim President Adly Mansour. “I cannot take responsibility before God, my conscience and country for a single drop of blood, especially because I know it was possible to spare it.”