Third day of clashes over Egypt’s military rule

SECURITY forces fired tear gas and clashed with several thousand protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the third straight day of violence that has killed at least 33 people and has turned into the most sustained challenge yet to the rule of Egypt’s military.

Throughout the day, young activists demanding the military hand over power to a civilian government skirmished with black-clad police, hurling stones and firebombs and throwing back the tear-gas canisters being fired by police into the square, which was the epicentre of the protest movement that ousted president Hosni Mubarak in February.

The night before saw an escalation of the fighting as police launched a heavy assault that tried and failed to clear protesters from the square. A constant stream of injured protesters — bloodied from rubber bullets or overcome by gas — were brought into makeshift clinics set out on sidewalks around the square where volunteer doctors scrambled from patient to patient.