CAIRO: Fifteen-year-old Ahmed Ali Mabrouk Hamada was killed Tuesday morning from gunshot wounds in a Mahalla hospital, sources in the Delta city told Daily News Egypt.
Hamada, a resident of Mahalla’s El-Gomhuriyya district, was shot in the head and admitted to hospital at midnight on Monday following violent clashes between residents and police during protests over rising food prices.
Violence had erupted in the town on Monday at around 4 pm, in a repeat of Sunday’s events when thousands of Mahalla residents and workers of the Ghazl El-Mahalla textile factory took to the streets following the afternoon shift.
Protestors were angry about the collapse of a strike in the Ghazl El-Mahalla factory, which was aborted after intimidation by security bodies and internal divisions between workers.
Public Prosecutor Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, who visited Mahalla on Monday had announced that 157 people involved in the demonstrations have been charged with a range of offences including riotous assembly and criminal damage.
News reports on Tuesday said that authorities had arrested 331 and that 113 people were wounded, including five state security policemen, in two days of clashes that saw police firing tear gas at stone-throwing protesters.
Television footage of the violent events showed acts of vandalism sweeping the city
Independent journalist Jano Charbel reported that residents he interviewed confirmed that the April 6 non-violent demonstrations had turned violent only after security forcefully tried to disperse demonstrators quickly turning the protest into a violent expression of popular discontent.
A microbus was set ablaze, Charbel reported, while three schools were torched, and two branches of the local fuul franchise Al-Baghl were partially destroyed.
Sources in Mahalla told Daily News Egypt that several journalists were prevented from covering the violent events.
Al-Jazeera television’s cameraman Yasser Soliman and his assistant were arrested on their way to film Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif’s visit, according to a TV report on Al-Jazeera news channel.
At time of press, the Jazeera crew had been held for three hours and the bureau had no information on their whereabouts.
Al-Jazeera also reported that a female journalist with a local channel Al-Saa was arrested following an argument with security at a café in Mahalla.
A high-level government team visited Mahalla on Tuesday for talks with textile workers.
Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, Investment Minister Mahmoud Mohieddin and Social Solidarity Minister Aly Moselhi held talks with employees of the Misr Spinning and Weaving factory who led the Mahalla protests, Mohammed Al-Attar, a leading worker at the factory, told AFP.
Minister of Manpower Aisha Abdel Hadi has already met the workers and promised the 24,000 employees a bonus worth 15 days’ pay, Al-Attar said.
Voting on municipal council seats in the tense city was canceled and instead 15 of the 56 seats were handed out to opposition parties, according to an official government document viewed by The Associated Press.
