(Newser)
–
Eyewitness accounts of last night’s violence in Cairo are pouring in through social media, and they paint an ugly picture of Egypt’s security forces, the New York Times observes. “Army vehicles deliberately crushed protesters using APCs, shot at them at random as they drove at them. This is what happened tonight,” one blogger tweeted (read her longer account here), and indeed, video aired on Egyptian TV shows military vehicles running down protesters. One Arab-American journalist added that police were using live ammunition—“the order was given in front of me."
The military appears to be suppressing unfriendly reporting of the incident, as well—one journalist blogged that the military had raided two independent television stations to cut off their live broadcasts, while another noted that an independent Cairo newspaper had had its power cut after posting graphic video of dead protesters. The Coptic Church, meanwhile, issued a statement accusing the military of sending “strangers” into protests to instigate riots and justify the use of force, according to the Times.
