CAIRO – The US, Turkey, India and Iraq on Sunday started organising the evacuation of their nationals from Egypt as an angry anti-government revolt raged into a sixth day amid increasing lawlessness and mass jail breaks.
“The US embassy in Cairo informs US citizens in Egypt who wish to depart that the department of state is making arrangements to provide transportation to safehaven locations in Europe,” an embassy statement said, as other countries issued travel warnings and scared tourists scrambled for flights out. Iraq said it would lay on special flights to evacuate its citizens from Egypt where they had fled to escape violence in their own country.
India sent one of state-run airline Air India’s planes to Egypt to evacuate Indian citizens, the airline said on Sunday. The statements came as thousands of protesters again crowded Cairo’s Tahrir square, epicentre of the biggest demonstrations in Egypt in three decades, demanding President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster despite his reform promises.
As troops manned checkpoints, frisking people for weapons before allowing them in, the square reverberated with the anti-Mubarak chants that have come to characterise the six-day popular revolt. Amid a good-tempered atmosphere that was far from the chaotic scenes of the past two days, the demonstrators bore an army officer in uniform high on their shoulders, while army vehicles drove around with “No to Mubarak” spray painted on their flanks in Arabic.
“Mubarak, go to Saudi Arabia,” the crowd shouted, encouraging the leader in power for 30 years to follow deposed Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile. With fears of insecurity rising and a death toll of at least 125, thousands of convicts broke out prisons across Egypt overnight after they overwhelmed guards or after prison personnel fled their posts.
An AFP correspondent saw 14 bodies in a mosque near Cairo’s Abu Zaabal prison, which a resident said were of two police and the rest convicts. Shots rang out in the neighbourhood and a resident said that all the prisoners had escaped and many had been killed. “There are many, many more bodies,” said a resident who asked not to be named. Troops set up checkpoints on roads to riot-hit prisons, stopping and searching cars for escaped convicts.
Among those who escaped were senior members of Egypt’s main opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as members of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, some of whom made it back to the Gaza Strip via smuggling tunnels. With rampant pillaging in more than five days of deadly protests, many Egyptians believe that the police have deliberately released prisoners in order to spread chaos and emphasise the need for the security forces.
