Samira Qilada and Makram Nazir sit below the photos of their 15-year-old daughter Mariam who was killed last year in Cairo, Egypt. - AP Photo.
CAIRO: A year later, the neighbours still speak of those killed the night they attacked the police station: The young man shot in the neck while carrying off his wounded friend; the bodybuilder who took a bullet in the hip; the 15-year-old girl shot in the face while standing on her roof.
On that day, January 28, 2011, the world was focused on Tahrir Square, the downtown center of the popular uprising that would end the 30-year rule of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But in neighborhoods across Cairo, residents were targeting the local face of Mubarak’s oppressive rule: the police station.
In the poor district of al-Zawiya al-Hamra that day, 1,000 protesters rallied in the shabby park in front of the station. Some threw rocks, then gas bombs, then the police opened fire, residents said. By morning, 45 residents and one police officer were dead and smoke still rose from the torched station.
On the anniversary of those deaths, ‘martyr’ posters adorn neighbourhood walls, and the lack of justice for the dead remains an open wound. Residents complain that no police have been punished, and it is unlikely that those facing trial will be convicted.
In a wider sense, their feelings one year after the uprising reflect those in many long-neglected parts of Egypt: That the revolution was necessary but its benefits have barely reached the common person.
”We feel that we are living among free people, but we haven’t seen anything concrete yet,” said Omar Ali, 46, who struggles to pay rent on a windowless flat by fixing computers.
But like many here, he is optimistic that the Muslim Brotherhood, whose political party holds nearly half the seats in the newly elected People’s Assembly, will serve the neighborhood well. The Brotherhood won heavily in al-Zawiya al-Hamra.
”They do what is right, they won’t oppress us and they fear God,” Omar said.
Al-Zawiya al-Hamra, a crowded grid of squat apartment blocks amid smoggy boulevards, typifies the decades of governmental neglect that helped fuel the uprising. It sprouted on agricultural land in northern Cairo in the 1960s when the government built blocks of drab, low-cost public housing and has since swelled to more than 300,000 people packed into just over a square mile.
Many streets are trash-strewn and unpaved, and public school classes often have 70 students. The government shuttered the local hospital for years for ”maintenance,” and even now it often turns patients away, residents said.
Unemployment rates are high. At night young men pass the time around wood fires on street corners. Crooks and drug dealers have long operated in the area.
Under Mubarak, the police station was the government’s most prominent local face, and it was often an ugly one. Officers beefed up meagre salaries by extorting locals and taking cash from drug dealers to look the other way, said Sayeed al-Sayid, a local lawyer. They often ignored poor residents’ calls for help.
”Those with money would enter the station and leave right away,” knowing they’d be helped, al-Sayid said. ”They would pay for police service.”
That frustration was common throughout Egypt, and protesters across the country attacked police stations, torching 99 in a few days. In many cases, police shot and killed protesters before fleeing.
The gunfire in al-Zawiya al-Hamra started around 7 pm and lasted until midnight, said Mohammed al-Sayid, a nearby butcher. Police fired on men near the station, but also hit people more than 200 yards away, he said, recalling residents collapsing on the sidewalk.
”It was like faucets of blood,” he said.
Bullet holes mar the walls of his shop. One bullet pierced the metal pan he uses to weigh meat. Bullets whizzed into the bedrooms of his neighbours. One bullet passed through the sleeve of a woman upstairs before lodging in her kitchen wall.
Lamie Suleiman, 63, said his son Girgis was shot in the neck while carrying a wounded man. Fathallah Ibrahim, 61, said his son Mohammed, a weightlifter, was heading to his metal workshop behind the station when he was shot in the hip. Both died soon after.
Samira Qilada was watching from her roof with her daughter Mariam, 15, when the girl collapsed.
”I went to see what happened and saw a river of blood from her face,” Qilada said. A bullet shattered the girl’s jaw. She died the next day.
Relatives of the dead have compiled a list of 45 people killed that night.
Anwar Awad, an officer in the station, said police were first told to fire in the air, then to protect the station.
”After people started attacking the station, (the police) were told that anyone getting close to the station or throwing stuff or firing at the station should be shot,” he said.
One officer, Abdullah Mahmoud, was shot dead in the chaos, he said.
Awad blamed the attack on criminals trying to settle scores with the police _ an argument police have used, sometimes successfully, in court cases.
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