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morning.
Angry mobs battled each other with Molotov cocktails, rocks and sticks outside the presidential palace complex.
Witnesses told Reuters that there also appeared to be at least four tanks outside the palace, and Egypt State Radio said that two armored personnel carriers had been deployed in a nearby area called Roxy in an attempt to separate the two sides.
The street battles were the worst violence since Egypt’s latest crisis erupted on November 22, when Mursi assumed near absolute powers.
The large scale and intensity of the fighting marked a milestone in Egypt’s rapidly emerging schism, pitting the Muslim Brotherhood and ultra-conservative Islamists in one camp, against liberals, leftists and Christians in the other.
It was the first time supporters of the rival camps have fought each other since last year’s uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.
Officials said seven people had been killed and 644 wounded in the violence, for which each side blamed the other, Reuters reported. The Muslim Brotherhood said six of the dead were Mursi supporters.
Hussein Abdel Ghani, spokesman of the opposition National Salvation Front, said more protests were planned, but not necessarily at the palace in Cairo’s Heliopolis district.
“Our youth are leading us today and we decided to agree to whatever they want to do,” he told Reuters.
The fighting erupted late Wednesday afternoon when thousands of Mursi’s Islamist supporters descended on an area near the presidential palace where some 300 of his opponents were staging a sit-in.
The Islamists, members of Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood, chased the protesters away from their base outside the palace’s main gate and tore down their tents.
After a brief lull, hundreds of Mursi opponents arrived and began throwing firebombs at the president’s backers, who responded with rocks.
By dawn, the violence had calmed. But both sides appeared to be digging in for a long struggle, with the opposition vowing more protests later yesterday and rejecting any dialogue unless the charter is rescinded.
The violence spread to other parts of the country on Wednesday. Anti-Mursi protesters stormed and set ablaze the Muslim Brotherhood offices in Suez and Ismailia, east of Cairo, and there were clashes in the industrial city of Mahallah and the province of Menoufiyah in the Nile Delta north of the capital.
There were rival demonstrations outside the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Alexandria. And security officials said senior Brotherhood official Sobhi Saleh was hospitalised after being severely beaten.
The opposition is demanding that Mursi rescind the decrees giving him nearly unrestricted powers and shelve the controversial draft constitution, which the president’s Islamist allies rushed through last week.
Mursi, for his part, seemed to be pressing relentlessly forward with plans for a December 15 constitutional referendum to pass the new charter.
Meanwhile, troops yesterday set up a perimetre fence around the presidential palace to keep protesters away.
Soldiers set up barbed wire barricades some 150 metres from the palace compound, after first ordering rival protesters to leave the area.
Mursi supporters left the area but several hundred opposition activists gathered in a square around 300 metres away.
Republican Guard chief General Mohammed Zaki said earlier the tanks were deployed to separate warring protesters, and pledged that the military “will not be an instrument of oppression.”
President Mursi was expected to deliver a televised address to the nation after five people were killed in the clashes pitting Islamists against an opposition that has escalated protests since he assumed extensive powers on November 22.
Egypt’s top Islamic body called on him to suspend the decree and demanded an unconditional dialogue between the president and his opponents. — NBC News/AFP.
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