Death toll in Egypt violence passes 500

The death toll from the clashes between police and supporters of Egypt’s ousted president has risen to 525, officials say.

The number of injured has also risen and now stood at 3,717, said the health ministry.

Yesterday’s violence began when police moved to clear two sit-in camps in Cairo by supporters of Mohammed Morsi, ousted in a military coup on July 3. The clashes there later spread to elsewhere in Cairo and a string of other cities.

The ministry said 202 of the dead were killed in the larger of the two camps, in Cairo’s eastern Nasr City district.

The violence prompted the government to declare a nationwide, month-long state of emergency.

A nighttime curfew was imposed in Cairo, Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, and 12 provinces where violence broke out.

The crackdown drew widespread condemnation from the Muslim world and the West, including the US, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei resigned as the interim vice president in protest – a blow to the new military-backed leadership’s credibility.

“Today was a difficult day,” interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi said in a televised address to the nation.

While he said he regretted the bloodshed, he offered no apologies for moving against the supporters of Mr Morsi, saying they were given ample warnings to leave and he had tried foreign mediation efforts.

Mr el-Beblawi said the government could not indefinitely tolerate a challenge to authority that the six-week-old protests represented.

“We want to see a civilian state in Egypt, not a military state and not a religious state,” he said.

The government has ordered the armed forces to support the police in restoring law and order and protect state facilities.

The leaders of Mr Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood called the events a “massacre”. Several of them were detained as police swept through the two sit-in sites, scores of other Islamists were taken into custody, and the future of the once-banned movement was uncertain.

Backed by helicopters, police fired tear gas and used armoured bulldozers to plough into the barricades at the two protest camps in different sections of Cairo where the Morsi supporters had been camped since before he was ousted by the military on July 3.

Army troops did not take part in the two operations, which began shortly after 7am local time, although they provided security at the locations.