CAIRO — Thousands of cane-wielding riot police Thursday beat protesters and journalists bloody, arresting hundreds as the Egyptian government clamped down on a demonstration in support of pro-reform judges.
Police toting shields and sticks and plainclothes security officers flooded the streets of the capital in the morning, sealing off roads and closing subway stations in preparation for the protest.
As bands of chanting demonstrators attempted to coalesce into a street protest, in swarmed the riot police. Men and women were dragged over the asphalt, kicked and beaten. Many were forced into police vehicles and taken away.
Journalists attempting to cover the protest also came under attack. Among those assaulted were a Reuters photographer, a cameraman for the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera and a Los Angeles Times reporter.
"I've never seen the level of brutality I saw today," said Rabab Mahdi, 31, a political science lecturer at the American University in Cairo. The attack was the latest incident amid a general crackdown on Egypt's fledgling, grass-roots democracy movement.
Despite promises of political change and the air of relative liberty that gripped the country last year, President Hosni Mubarak's regime now appears keen to silence -- or at least quiet -- dissent.
Dozens of opposition figures, including activists from the semi-underground Muslim Brotherhood and leftist groups, have been rounded up and jailed. More than 50 pro-democracy activists are being held in the notorious Tora Prison, south of Cairo. They include prominent blogger Alaa Seif al-Islam, whose website has been publishing strident anti-Mubarak writings and photographs. About 40 of the inmates are said to be on a hunger strike to protest the prison conditions.
The Egyptian government has also postponed for two years local elections that were to be held in April. And it has renewed its controversial emergency law, imposed when Mubarak took power in 1981, which allows for arbitrary arrest and detention without charge. Lifting of the emergency law was a key promise in Mubarak's election campaign last year.
Attempts to reach Egyptian officials for comment on Thursday's violence were unsuccessful.
In Washington, the State Department criticized the Egyptian government's actions.
