Four days after at least 26 protesters were killed outside Maspero when the army opened fire and ran people over with armored personnel carriers (APC), virtually all of Thursday's papers follow the military line.
Leftist party paper Al-Wafd leads with a giant red headline declaring, “The armed forces affirm their innocence from the blood of the Copts.”
According to an article on the front page of Al-Wafd, Coptic Priest Filobateer Gameel pressured the sister of protester Mina Daniel, who was shot dead outside Maspero, into refusing an autopsy report. The paper says that according to Daniel's sister, Mary, “our rights are lost day after day because of the priests,” but doesn't expand on these comments.
Inside, as part of an “Egypt is sad” special report on the incident, Al-Wafd produces what it claims are “the complete details” about Sunday's events under the headline “The Maspero massacre … the end of the ‘love story’ between the military and protesters.”
Al-Wafd also speaks to relatives of the victims and refers to Prime Minister Essam Sharaf as “the head of the discord government” because of what it describes as his failure to respond adequately to Coptic grievances.
State daily Al-Ahram faithfully reproduces the content of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) press conference Wednesday without challenging its version of events: that unknown individuals infiltrated the Maspero protest on Sunday and were responsible for the deaths that occurred.
The army buried two of its “martyrs,” as the paper refers to them, on Monday evening, but the soldiers will remain anonymous as the military has said “the appearance of the martyrs’ families or their military funerals would increase tension in society, which in turn would affect the cohesion of the domestic front."
Party politics and changing alliances continue to shake out in the run-up to the parliamentary elections. Al-Ahram reports that the Salafi-led Nour Party has decided to contest 50 percent of the seats in the elections beginning in November. The Islamic Labor Party has withdrawn from the Democratic Alliance coalition in protest of the presence of what it sees as “cartoon” political parties, such as one created by the State Security Investigation Services and another by Safwat al-Sherif, former Shura Council speaker and secretary general of the dissolved National Democratic Party.
In an Al-Ahram column titled “Emergency law for criminals,” Ahmed al-Bery describes being accosted recently by masked men at 9 pm on his way home. In light of this, he asks how “people can still insist that the state of emergency should be cancelled and civilians not be tried in military courts."
“They are forgetting that they themselves risk facing this kind of situation in which they could lose their lives,” the paper reported him saying.
Independent Al-Shorouk leads with the news that Finance Minister Hazem al-Beblawy – whose resignation was rejected Tuesday – “didn’t want to go to the office [on Wednesday] and instead wanted to go anywhere in the world until he calmed down.”
“I took, and expressed, a political stand and made my point and will remain in my post so that my decision doesn’t have a negative impact on the Egyptian economy,” Beblawy is quoted as saying.
On page four, Al-Shorouk reports that the Coptic Church has cut off all communication with the government following the Maspero protest. This is the first time the church has done this, the paper says, explaining that even during the crisis between the Coptic Church and President Anwar Sadat some lines of communication were kept open.
Egypt's papers:
Al-Ahram: Daily, state-run, largest distribution in Egypt
Al-Akhbar: Daily, state-run, second to Al-Ahram in institutional size
Al-Gomhurriya: Daily, state-run
Rose al-Youssef: Daily, state-run
Al-Dostour: Daily, privately owned
Al-Shorouk: Daily, privately owned
Al-Wafd: Daily, published by the liberal Wafd Party
Youm7: Daily, privately owned
Al-Tahrir: Daily, privately owned
Sawt al-Umma: Weekly, privately owned
Al-Arabi: Weekly, published by the Arab Nasserist party
