Last Updated, 6:04 p.m. As our colleagues Kareem Fahim and David Kirkpatrick report, Egyptian protesters clashed with riot police officers outside the presidential palace in Cairo on Friday night.
Protesters hurled rocks and launched fireworks over the building’s outer wall, setting fire to a guard tower and drawing a robust response from security forces, who protesters said fired tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot, causing many to flee through the streets of an upper-class Cairo neighborhood.
Video, photographs and text reports uploaded by activist bloggers and journalists on the scene showed the clashes, as protesters hurled rocks and launched fireworks over the palace walls, setting fire to a guard tower, and officers fired tear gas, rubber bullets and birdshot, causing many to flee through the streets of the upper-class Cairo neighborhood. In one instantly notorious incident that unfolded on live television, officers stripped and beat a protester outside the palace. Graphic images of the beating were recorded from at least two angles, and broadcast on both Egypt’s ONTV and Al Hayat, a satellite news channel.
A well-known rights lawyer, Ragia Omran, reported on Twitter that one protester died after being shot in the head and neck outside the palace.
Earlier on Friday, video posted online by Tahrir News, an independent news organization, appeared to show officers setting fire to a small tent city that protesters had erected outside the walls of the palace.
Video posted online by Magdy Samaan, an Egyptian journalist, appeared to show protesters hurling Molotov cocktails and setting a guard tower alight, as the crowd chanted for President Mohamed Morsi to “Leave!” Off camera, protesters could also be heard chanting “The People Want the Fall of the Regime,” another signature chant of the Egyptian revolution.
After the protests against Egypt’s new Islamist president turned violent, the Muslim Brotherhood’s official English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb, drew attention to video of protesters throwing rocks and launching fireworks over the walls of the palace from Al-Hayat, a satellite news channel. Mr. Morsi, long a senior leader of the Brotherhood, was the movement’s candidate for the presidency.
Mr. Morsi’s office posted condemned the protesters in updates on Twitter, and even tried to reclaim the mantle of the 2011 revolution.
Until Mr. Morsi was sworn into office last summer, protests outside the presidential palace were all but unheard of and clashes with the hated security forces typically took place outside police stations or the downtown headquarters of the Interior Ministry. As the activist blogger Wael Eskandar noted, that changed in early December.
After Islamist supporters of the president attacked protesters outside the palace in December, the Muslim Brotherhood was blamed for provoking the violence. On Friday, a note posted on Ikhwanweb said that the Brotherhood would not call on rank-and-file members to defend the presidential palace.
As the clashes between the security forces and protesters escalated on Friday night, Bel Trew, a British journalist for the state news site Ahram Online, reported from the scene that officers of the Central Security Forces were shooting at protesters, or those they believed to be protesters, at close range.
She also reported seeing the police shoot one man with birdshot at close range outside a Costa Cafe. He was not a protester, but a cafe employee leaving work, she said.
Protesters also gathered in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo on Friday, where witnesses said the scene was much more subdued.
