The moment I got to the area of the Maspero Building and before the march could reach it from the other side of the street, I found the people from the demonstration chanting, “Muslims, Christians, one hand!” and about thirty seconds later I saw ranks of Central Security men running at us and firing in the air. Everyone ran to get away from the shooting and the shooting that had been into the air started to be at the level of our bodies. I ran to the first street and turned to see what was going on and to look for my friends on the other side of the street from Maspero, next to the Nile. I found that the shooting was continuous and everyone was running. Soldiers from the army and Central Security had us surrounded from every direction—on top of the overpass, underneath the overpass, Ramses Hilton Street, and Abd El Men’em Reyad Square. People with children and old people began running in every direction trying to get out of danger. Everyone was really stunned. No one was prepared for such violence.
At 6:26 I said on Twitter: “The bastards are firing on a march full of children,” and at 6:32: “Another round of shooting.”
At the time, I was at the Ramses Hilton on the Nile, and most of the people who were left were with me. I was standing in the middle of the road trying to work out what had happened. Suddenly, we heard people shouting at us to get up onto the pavement. We ran and saw two armoured army personnel carriers driving at crazy speed down the middle of the road, which was full of people. At first, I thought they were just stupid soldiers and were going to kill us with their stupidity but then the carriers started driving at this crazy speed this way and that along the street. They were driving in zigzags. They’d see a group trying to escape and drive after them. They’d drive up onto the pavement and run over people. They’d see people on the other side and they’d turn and crush them. I was terrified. Then the first two carriers were switched for two others, which did the same—driving crazily, running people over, everyone running in all directions to get out of the way of their attempts to run them over. One group of people, among them two very young girls, fourteen to fifteen years old, were hiding behind a private car that was parked there. I saw the carrier drive in their direction, ride up over the car and smash it, and crush one of the people who were hiding. The rest ran in the direction of the Central Security forces to save themselves.
The two carriers drove off and quickly disappeared but one slowed down and everyone gathered together and ran behind it and pelted it with stones as it was moving and they stopped it and threw at it the remains of a broken traffic light that was on fire. The carrier caught fire and the stones continued. Most of the people started chanting, “Stop the stones,” and kept shouting at the soldier, “Get out! Get out! Get out!” so that he wouldn’t be afraid. They were afraid he’d be burned inside. Eventually, the soldier climbed out and jumped and some people started hitting him, but most tried to save him. That soldier had just killed our brothers and sisters, he’d just been charging us with a heart of stone, but the people decided not to stain their hands with blood. I saw him running away under the protection of two elderly men.
I now moved towards a building in front of which there was a group of people. I found myself coming to a halt with a corpse at my feet. His chest was full of bullet holes, his shirt was torn from the blood and the bullets. I froze. Then a boy shoved me and told me not to just stand there like that and I helped him move the body into the entrance of the building. I went into the entrance of the building and found lots of people there and two doctors helping lots of wounded people and there were two bodies in front of me. We put the man riddled with bullets next to them. Another man had taken a shot to the chest, and the doctor was trying to find a pulse and failing. Next to them was a boy whose head had been squashed and chest flattened from being run over by the personnel carrier. All the injured and the bodies that I saw were wearing civilian clothing. I tried to help out at the “hospital” in the stairwell of the building, but I was in such a state of shock I couldn’t do anything, so I went out. Everyone outside was stunned. It felt like we were at war.
After a few minutes, I wrote on Twitter, “According to what I saw and reliable witness statements, three died.” I couldn’t imagine things could be so bad.
I went looking for my girlfriend near the Ramses Hilton. There were lots of people, especially ladies of my mother’s age, standing and praying in the middle of the street, asking God to have mercy on us, and suddenly I found a hail of bullets being fired at us from on top of the overpass. There was a long line of soldiers from the army firing at us. Everyone ran and then a few came back and courageously faced the bullets with bricks. In the middle of the confusion, I saw a man fall to a bullet.
The shooting went on for a while and then stopped and the tear gas began. It caused severe choking and burned the skin more than usual. I went into a side street to buy a Pepsi for the gas. I saw a woman screaming and saying, “O Lord, is there no place for us in our own country, O Lord? O Lord, are You trying to tell us that theirs is the true religion, O Lord? Have mercy on us, O Lord!” I went and hugged her and saw that she was standing with her husband, who had been hit by a bullet, at her feet. We tried to move him so we could get him to the first aid station. He was dying and making frightening rattling noises and the blood was coming out of his chest in spurts. The rattling and the blood stopped before we reached the first aid station, and the first aid man told us he was dead and that we’d have to wait for another ambulance as the priority was for the critically injured. I was sitting on the ground, holding the lady in my arms, she was screaming, and her husband was next to us, dead. Till now I haven’t been able to find out his name so I can go and offer my condolences.
Horror-stricken, I went out onto the main street. The shooting at people and the gas was continuing, and from our side, the throwing of bricks was continuing. I sat on the pavement and cried for a little till a friend of mine called Muhammad pulled me by the hands and got me away from a gas canister that had exploded next to me. I thought of the slogan “Muslims, Christians, One Hand!” that I’d been hearing through all of this.
The situation went on this way for hours. Then suddenly a group of young men wearing cheap clothes and holding machetes appeared behind us, chanting racist slogans against Christians. Later, when we talked to them, we found out that they were from Bulaq. They’d heard on the TV that the Christians had armed themselves and were attacking the army, so they’d gone out onto the street to defend the army. One of them kept asking, “Where are the Christians’ weapons?”
It was a long night. We continued to be shot at at Maspero and into the centre of town for hours. Vile people shouting “Islamic” slogans appeared and insulted the Christians. One of my friends saw them getting down from a Central Security truck. We’d gone back to the same old dirty work.
I can’t go on now.
What happened on Sunday had nothing to do with confrontations between Muslims and Christians and it wasn’t communal conflict. It was simply violence by the authorities against peaceful demonstrators, the same as used to happen in the days of Mubarak. And not just that, but the authorities were prepared to use the media to make Egyptians fight one another on the basis of lies. They were prepared to set the country on fire.
But what is clear to me is that Sunday overturned all our preconceptions. Sunday proved that the Military Council is prepared to sacrifice us all, Muslims and Christians, create communal strife out of nothing, and ask Egyptians to go out onto the streets and beat up other Egyptians just like themselves, just so they can keep the regime we wanted to get rid of the way it was.
That day a still unknown number of demonstrators was martyred. The lowest number given by the Ministry of Health was twenty-five. I personally saw seventeen bodies. One of them was a boy I knew called Mina Danyal. Mina was someone I’d met in Tahrir. We weren’t friends but I knew him. Mina was a brave young man: on the day of the Battle of the Camel he was hit by a bullet and survi
ved. This time, though, the bullet, which struck his chest and went out through his back, killed him.
Brave Mina, whom I used to see at the demonstrations, I saw dead. It didn’t look like him.
TESTIMONY OF SHENOUDA ASSAD
The beginning
Today’s march was different from the two other marches held before this to condemn the demolition of the church of St. George in the village of Marinab.
The numbers were huge compared to before.
Shubra Street was closed off starting at the Shubra roundabout and all the way to Masarra.
That whole stretch of the street was packed with people.
Muslims and Copts.
They weren’t happy with the way the last sit-in in front of Maspero had been broken up using force. And they weren’t happy with the churches being burned down—acts of injustice and no punishment or deterrence. So they went out onto the streets chanting “Muslims, Christians, One Hand!”
Most of the chants were directed against Tantawi and the Military Council, and we had more Muslims with us than the times before.
We went down Shubra Street as normal as could be.
A few minor clashes and harassments as usual.
Still, because the numbers were huge and everyone was furious, no one dared to insult us or spit on us like the two times before.
The calm before the storm.
We reached the beginning of Shubra safely.
As we were going through the Shubra underpass, under the Sabtiya overpass, we met with a downpour of stones and bricks falling on us from on top of the overpass.
A few people suffered minor injuries and they were given first aid on the spot.
We waited under the overpass till the young men from the Maspero Union went up on top of it.
As soon as they saw them, the people who’d been throwing bricks ran away.
We satisfied ourselves that it was just a minor exchange and those types were just local people who hadn’t liked the sight of the crosses in the march so they’d decided to say good morning in their own special way.
We kept going till we reached Qulali.
We got to a building there belonging to the local council and heard very heavy firing.
Everyone split up and began running in different directions.
There was a priest standing in the back of one of the trucks that had the chanters who were leading the demonstration.
As soon as he saw that there was trouble, he took hold of the microphone and began calming people down.
He said, exactly, “Everyone, our demonstration is peaceful. Whatever provocations or harassments occur, it will remain peaceful. And, please, we don’t want anyone getting angry or losing control. We don’t want to spoil the look of the march with insults or abuse.”
Everyone calmed down a little and the chants against the Council and Tantawi and Enan began to heat up.
The massacre
We reached the Ramses Hilton, and, before we could go on to Maspero, there was a priest who got up into the truck that was leading the demonstration and said, “Everyone, we’ve come here to deliver a message and then we’ll leave right away. Whatever happens, our march is going to stay peaceful. We haven’t come to pick quarrels or fight. We’re saying, ‘O Lord, kyrie eleison!’ If anything happens to anyone or anyone gets injured or dies, I assure you they will be regarded by Our Lord as martyrs for Christ.”
It was as though the priest could feel what was going to happen. Half an hour later, everyone understood why the priest had said that, and their enthusiasm was rekindled, and we continued the march.
I stopped to buy a can of Pepsi from a kiosk in front of the Ramses Hilton, and I phoned my mother and sister to tell them I was okay.
The important thing is, I was held up for about ten minutes.
The group that I’d set out with had got far ahead of me and I was now at the back of the march.
As soon as we entered the Corniche, we heard a sudden very intense burst of gunfire and all at once we saw that everyone in front of us was turning and running towards us, shouting, “Run! They’re shooting!”
I thought the army must be trying to scare us as usual with a few shots in the air.
All at once, all the streetlights went out and I heard the sound of screeching tyres.
I looked and saw an army personnel carrier coming from the distance at an insane speed and with a soldier at the gun that was mounted on it spraying bullets in all directions.
The carrier was running over everyone in its path.
The light was very poor and nobody could really see what was happening in front of him. All we could hear was the screams and the sound of the glass in the building before the Maspero Building shattering from the bullets.
I ran to take cover between two parked cars till the carrier had passed and I thought, “It’s over.”
I looked and saw two more personnel carriers coming fast and doing the same.
They too were running over everyone in their path.
They got to the end of the street, turned around, and came back, repeating what they’d done but on the other side.
Imagine what everyone looked like in their panic, especially given that most of the march was made up of ladies and youngsters.
We ran towards an alley that leads to the parallel street.
It was black as pitch.
Sounds of crying and screams everywhere.
I kept running till I reached the Ramses Hilton.
I stopped and tried to take in the scene that I saw. I was stunned by the army’s reaction because no one had expected it would be so violent.
I was stunned at the sight of the body parts that filled the place, and the sound of the weeping and of people screaming “O Lord! O Virgin! O Jesus!” After about ten minutes, the young people began to try to move the injured and take them away.
No matter what I write or say, I’ll never be able to describe the horror of the bloody scene that I saw.
I saw two of them carrying someone the lower half of whose body was missing.
I looked at his face and found it was the person who’d been chanting in front of me. Before we entered, I’d been walking next to him, from where I joined the march to where I stopped and bought a Pepsi. In other words, if I hadn’t bought a Pepsi and been held up, I would have been where he was.
I saw several people who’d taken bullets all over their bodies and whose blood was all over the street.
Everyone had gone berserk.
Some of them tried to remove the bodies and take them into the Ramses Hilton, but the security personnel prevented them and assaulted them, so everyone went insane and began knocking and banging on the glass.
As I walked, I saw around ten Central Security trucks going into the Maspero area.
I don’t know what happened after that because I didn’t know what I was doing.
I stood in the street for around half an hour unaware of what was going on around me, I was in such a state of shock.
When I got home, I found my family was of course looking for me everywhere.
I also found Egyptian state TV, which I cannot find words filthy enough to describe, saying a lot of very weird nonsense, such as “Two soldiers die martyrs’ deaths at hands of Coptic demonstrators” and how Coptic demonstrators had tried to storm the Maspero Building and fired live rounds at the army’s forces.
That was bad enough, but those sons of bastards the talk show hosts with their provocative language were something else.
The bottom line is I want to make a few things clear, so everyone understands what really happened.
First: There were Muslims with us on the march, maybe not many, but more than on the two previous marches. They even joined in some of the Chr
istian chants.
Second: When we came under fire at the beginning of Shubra, all we did was run. If we’d had weapons on us, as the media says, the least we’d have done was respond to the attacks.
Three: Throughout the march, we kept repeating that it was peaceful, and the priest warned us more than once against any provocation or harassment that might lead to violence.
Four: The number of people who were run over or killed by bullets was many times the number the media has reported so far (thirty-nine martyrs).
Five: As I said before, some people had a very strong reaction to the sight of the blood and the body parts everywhere. So any incidents of violence or assault after this between the demonstrators and the army or the police would be a very natural consequence of what happened (same scenario as the incidents that took place during the revolution).
Now, I beg of you, don’t believe a word of what is being said on Egyptian TV, no matter how respected or trusted the person who says it. That filthy place…There isn’t a millimetre of space in the Maspero Building that isn’t under the control of the soldiery. There isn’t a word said there that isn’t planned and calculated.
The Republic of False Truths Page 33