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CAIRO (AFP) – Thousands took to the streets in the Egyptian canal city of Port Said on Monday for the funeral of three people killed in overnight clashes with police.<\/p>\n
“The interior ministry (officials) are cowards!” the angry mourners chanted and called on Islamist President Mohamed Morsi to “leave”.<\/p>\n
Five people, including two policemen, were killed and hundreds were injured in the overnight fighting after authorities decided to move prisoners awaiting a verdict over alleged involvement in a deadly football riot last year.<\/p>\n
The two policemen died from gunshots to the head and neck, an interior ministry official said.<\/p>\n
Of the 586 people injured in the confrontations, 16 had been shot with live bullets and 27 from birdshot, according to Ahmed Sultan, head of emergency services.<\/p>\n
A security official said earlier that during the night protesters threw petrol bombs and stones at the police station in Port Said, where a general strike entered its third week. Police responded with tear gas.<\/p>\n
Fresh violence broke out on Monday afternoon near the security headquarters, where protesters threw petrol bombs at police under clouds of tear gas.<\/p>\n
The city has witnessed unrest since January when a court sentenced Port Said residents to death over football violence last year, triggering a series of protests and eventually a civil disobedience campaign.<\/p>\n
Traffic in the Suez Canal, a vital waterway for global commerce, has not been disrupted, the canal authority said.<\/p>\n
The interior ministry said it decided to move the prisoners from Port Said because it wanted to avoid unrest.<\/p>\n
The court verdict, expected next Saturday, is for the 39 defendants in a case which resulted in death sentences in January for 21 other defendants, sparking clashes that killed at least 40 people.<\/p>\n
Residents of Port Said and other canal cities have long complained that Cairo marginalises them.<\/p>\n
Last year’s football riot which killed 74 people, mostly supporters of a visiting Cairo team, exacerbated Port Said’s isolation, residents of the city say.<\/p>\n
Overnight clashes also erupted in Cairo between police and protesters near Tahrir Square.<\/p>\n
Police fired tear gas to disperse the crowd as they approached a luxury hotel on the banks of the Nile which was damaged in clashes last month, a security official said.<\/p>\n
Officials say calm has since been restored to the area.<\/p>\n
Egypt has been gripped by nationwide unrest in recent months, with protesters taking to the streets to denounce Islamist President Mohamed Morsi for failing to address political and economic concerns.<\/p>\n
Opponents accuse Morsi — elected in June last year after a turbulent period of military rule — of failing the revolution that brought him to the presidency and of consolidating power in the hands of his Muslim Brotherhood movement.<\/p>\n
The Nile Delta has also seen its share of unrest, with a civil disobedience campaign declared in the province of Daqahliyah.<\/p>\n
One person was killed and dozens injured in clashes over the weekend between police and protesters in Mansura, the province capital.<\/p>\n
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An Egyptian man kicks a burnt-out police car following clashes with police in Cairo’s on Tahrir Square on March 3, 2013. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}