Egyptian football violence: at least 70 people dead after fire and riot at Egyptian football match

By Richard Spencer in Cairo7:00AM GMT 02 Feb 2012
Fans of Al-Masry, a team based in Port Said at the northern end of the Suez Canal, invaded the pitch celebrating the team’s home win over Al-Ahly, the Cairo-based club that is Egypt’s biggest and most successful, and attacked amid what seemed to be an almost total absence of police.
Players fled to their changing rooms, from where the Al-Ahly team called their in-house television channel to give eye-witness accounts and denounce the lack of security.
There were wildly different estimates of casualties, but doctors said they believed 73 were dead.
Meanwhile, the Cairo International Stadium, which Al-Ahly shares with its local rivals Zamalek, was briefly set on fire after the evening game there was cancelled as a mark of respect.
The violence is a telling sign of the lack of security in Egypt following last year’s revolution. That was in part triggered by outrage at unchecked brutality by police, and one of the Mubarak regime’s first responses was to call them off the streets and put the army in charge of protests.
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But since then it has proved difficult to persuade even beat policemen to return. The Al-Ahly team were earlier shown arriving in Port Said in a convoy of police trucks. Egyptian teams have devoted fan bases known as Ultras in imitation of their European equivalents, and fans involved in last night’s violence have a history of bad blood.
The ‘Ultras’ have also played a role at the forefront of pro-democracy protests. Activists were already speculating last night that some of the thugs regularly hired by supporters of the old Mubarak regime might have been involved in the violence.
“The events in Port Said are planned and are a message from the remnants of the former regime,” said Essam el-Erian, the vice-president of the Freedom and Justice Party.
The last major football violence in Egypt took place in Nov 2009 around a World Cup play-off game with Algeria, Egypt’s biggest rivals, when fans stoned the visiting team’s bus, causing a major diplomatic incident.
Last night’s trouble began immediately after the game, which Al-Masry won 3-1, when fans stormed on to the pitch, chasing the Al-Ahly players and the visiting fans.
An official from a local hospital said most of the dead had been crushed or suffocated. “There are 11 deaths at my hospital,” Medhat El-Esnawy, the manager of Port Said’s El-Amiry hospital said. “Two other hospitals have 25 deaths. Three fans have also died in the stadium.” However, some of the dead, who included ground security staff, are thought to have suffered stab wounds. There were 1,000 injuries.
Television commentators wept on air, one screaming that the sport was not worth what had happened. The Al-Ahly channel put one of the club’s veteran players, Mohamed Abou-Treika, live on air from the changing rooms. “The security forces left us, they did not protect us,” he said. “One fan has just died in the dressing room in front of me.
“This is not football. This is a war and people are dying in front of us. There is no movement and no security and no ambulances. I call for the Premier League to be cancelled.”
Another, Mohamed Barakat, said: “It is our fault because we played that match. The authorities are afraid to cancel the league because they just care about money, they do not care about the lives of people.”
The fire at the Cairo stadium was blamed on an electrical short circuit. However, television pictures clearly showed fireworks being shot from the stands in protest after the announcement that the game between Zamalek and Ismaily was being called off.
The country’s newly elected parliament will hold an emergency session today, while Samir Faher, head of the Egyptian Football Association, announced the Premier League was being suspended. By then, the two main clubs in Egypt’s second city Alexandria, Ittihad and Smouha, had already announced they were withdrawing from the league, while several of the Al-Ahly team vowed never to play again.

ေဘာလုံးရန္ပဲြ မတားႏုိင္မႈ အီဂ်စ္လူထု႐ႈတ္ခ် By ဗီြအိုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန) အီဂ်စ္ႏုိင္ငံေျမာက္ပုိင္း Port Said ၿမိဳ႕က ေဘာလုံးပဲြ အဓိက႐ုဏ္းေၾကာင့္ လူ ၇၄ ေယာက္ ေသဆုံးၿပီး ရာခ်ီ ထိခုိက္ဒဏ္ရာေတြ ရခဲ့ၾကတဲ့အထိ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရတဲ့အတြက္ အာဏာရ စစ္ေကာင္စီနဲ႔ လုံၿခံဳေရး တပ္ဖဲြ႔ေတြကုိ ျပစ္တင္႐ႈတ္ခ်ၿပီး ကုိင္႐ုိၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္မွာ လူေထာင္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ဆႏၵျပခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ဆႏၵျပသူတခ်ဳိ႕ကေတာ့ ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္မွာရွိတဲ့ Tahrir ရင္ျပင္မွာ ၾကာသပေတးေန႔က စုေဝးခဲ့ၾကသလုိ ျပည္ထဲေရး ဝန္ႀကီးဌာန အနီးကုိ ခ်ီတက္သြားသူေတြကုိေတာ့ လုံထိန္းတပ္ဖဲြ႔ေတြက မ်က္ရည္ယုိ ဗုံးေတြနဲ႔ ပစ္ခတ္ဟန္႔တားခဲ့တာပါ။ ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔ အဓိက႐ုဏ္းအတြင္း ဒဏ္ရာရခဲ့သူေတြအပါအဝင္ လြတ္ေျမာက္လာသူေတြ ျပန္လည္ ေရာက္ရွိလာၾကတဲ့ ကုိင္႐ုိဘူတာ အနီးမွာလည္း လူအုပ္တအုပ္က စစ္အစုိးရကုိ ဆန္႔က်င္တဲ့ ေႂကြးေၾကာ္သံေတြကုိ ေအာ္ဟစ္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ အားကစား ရာဇဝင္မွာ အဆုိးရြားဆုံး ႀကံဳခဲ့ရတဲ့ အျဖစ္အပ်က္အတြက္ အစုိးရက အီဂ်စ္ေဘာလုံး အဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ဘုတ္အဖဲြ႔ကုိ အလုပ္ျဖဳတ္လုိက္သလုိ Port Said ၿမိဳ႕ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမႉးနဲ႔ လုံၿခံဳေရးတာဝန္ရွိသူ အႀကီးအကဲေတြကုိလည္း တာဝန္က ရပ္စဲထားလုိက္ၿပီလုိ႔လည္း စစ္တပ္က ခန္႔အပ္ထားတဲ့ ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ Kamal al-Ganzuri က ေျပာလုိက္တာပါ။ အျပစ္ေပး အေရးယူဖုိ႔ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ကုိေတာ့ လႊတ္ေတာ္ အေရးေပၚ အစည္းအေဝးအတြင္း ေၾကညာခဲ့တာလုိ႔လည္း ေျပာပါတယ္။ အီဂ်စ္ စစ္ေကာင္စီ အစုိးရရဲ႕ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ႀကီး Mohamed Tantawi ကေတာ့ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ ဝမ္းနည္းျခင္း အထိမ္းအမွတ္အျဖစ္ ၃ ရက္ၾကာ သတ္မွတ္ဖုိ႔ ေၾကညာလုိက္သလုိ တာဝန္ရွိသူေတြကုိ ေဖာ္ထုတ္မယ္လုိ႔လည္း ေျပာခဲ့တာပါ။ ရဲတပ္ဖဲြ႔ကေတာ့ ေလာေလာဆယ္ သံသယရွိသူ လူ ၄၇ ေယာက္ကုိ ဖမ္းဆီးထားပါတယ္။