A new audio recording broadcast by Al-Jazeera reveals Egypt’s interior minister giving directions to the police about how to crackdown on protesters, using automatic live bullets when needed.
According to Al-Jazeera, the Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim is heard presiding over a meeting of Egypt’s Central Security Force ahead of a major protest led by youth groups on 28 November, 2014. Hundreds of activists were arrested during the protest.
Ibrahim is heard discussing a strategy for dealing with the demonstrations, including ways to shoot protesters without turning them into “martyrs”.
He says if you have a gathering of more than 100 people, even in a mosque, you can arrest them when they attempt to leave.
Marwan Bishara, Al-Jazeera’s senior political analyst, said the recording points to the central role of the military in dealing with protests following the ousting of former President Hosni Mubarak.
“It shows how confident, comfortable and complicit the military is in the sort of chaos going on in the country today,” he said.
Interior Minister Ibrahim goes on to say that there will never be another revolution without the backing of both the police and the military.
Mubarak was ousted by a popular protest in 2011 when the military withdrew its support for the president.
Ibrahim is also heard discussing the suspension of a security official for shooting protesters in the eye with birdshot.
It is revealed that the officer was reinstated and that his brother is one of those who attended the meeting.
Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.
