Thousands of protesters came out into the streets of Cairo on Friday, to be met with concerted opposition from the security police, who kept them away from Maidan al-Tahrir (Liberation Square) with crowd control vehicles, police phalanxes, and barriers. People massed on bridges and overpasses beyond the grasp of the police below, and sometimes threw rocks down on police vehicles. Increasingly the protesters faced tear gas in such quantities that it covered the Egyptian capital with a low-lying fog.
I am watching on Aljazeera as undeterred crowds are carrying away checkpoint barriers, surrounding crowd-control vehicles and rocking them back and forth in hopes of toppling them. One man threw himself down the hatch of an armored vehicle and emerged with a pellet gun. AP says people on balconies were throwing down lemons and other things that people could use on their faces to counteract the tear gas.
Mohamed Elbaradei, the Nobel peace prize winner and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, showed up at the al-Istiqamah Mosque in Giza, and had to be pulled inside by the congregants to avoid a police charge. As it was, he was soaking wet from the spray of a water canon. He and his supporters, including the editor of the al-Dastur (Constitution) Newspaper, were thereafter more or less surrounded and trapped in the mosque. Those outside were allegedly beaten by police. Baradei condemned the violent repression of the protests and called for President Hosni Mubarak to step down.
BBC is reporting a full scale clash between 3,000 protesters in Suez and security forces in the center of that city.
There were also protests in Alexandria, Mansoura and other provincial cities.
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