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Coming to Mourn Tahrir Square’s Dead, and Joining Them Instead
Killing of Shaimaa el-Sabbagh in Cairo Angers Egyptians
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICKFEB. 3, 2015
Photo
Shaimaa el-Sabbagh, a 31-year-old mother and poet, was shot by masked riot police officers on Jan. 24 while heading to Tahrir Square in Cairo to lay flowers.
Killing of Shaimaa el-Sabbagh in Cairo Angers Egyptians
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICKFEB. 3, 2015
Photo
Shaimaa el-Sabbagh, a 31-year-old mother and poet, was shot by masked riot police officers on Jan. 24 while heading to Tahrir Square in Cairo to lay flowers.
- CAIRO — Her friends wanted to lay a wreath in Tahrir Square as a memorial, but Shaimaa el-Sabbagh urged them to reconsider. She feared that the police might attack, mistaking them for supporters of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said a cousin, Sami Mohamed Ibrahim.
But how, her friends asked, could the police attack civilians who were armed only with flowers? So she kissed her 5-year-old son, Bilal, goodbye; left him in the care of a friend near her home in Alexandria; and, a day before the anniversary of the start of the Arab Spring revolt here, boarded a train for Cairo.
By midafternoon on Jan. 24, Ms. Sabbagh, 31, lay dead on a crowded street downtown, a potent symbol of the lethal force the Egyptian authorities have deployed to silence the cacophony of protest and dissent unleashed here four years ago. Human rights advocates say the cold brutality of her killing shows how far the military-backed government is willing to go to enforce a return to the old authoritarian order.Stark images of her killing resonated so widely here that in a televised appearance Sunday, even President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi offered condolences, declaring that he saw Ms. Sabbagh as “my own daughter.” At the same time, police attempts to deflect blame for her killing have been undercut by Ms. Sabbagh’s personal profile: as a mother, an accomplished poet and a left-leaning activist who supported the military ouster of the Islamist president.
Video
PLAY VIDEO
Final Moments of Activist Shot in Cairo
Videos captured the final moments of the Egyptian activist Shaimaa al-Sabbagh’s life before and after she was shot by the police during a peaceful protest in Cairo on Jan. 24.
Publish DateFebruary 3, 2015.Photo by Emad El-Gebaly/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
Photographers and videographers captured her death moment by moment. As soon as the procession began and without any warning, masked riot police officers blasted the crowd with tear gas and birdshot from across a narrow street. A shotgun cracked. A kneeling friend held Ms. Sabbagh by the waist to keep her upright, blood streaking down her cheeks and his head against her abdomen. Then another friend carried her limp frame, cradled in his arms, through the tear gas in a vain attempt to save her.
Seldom has a needless death by police gunfire been so thoroughly and so movingly documented, rights advocates say, citing both the photographic evidence and multiple witnesses.
“A woman who went out to lay a wreath of flowers on Tahrir Square — we see her taking her last breath,” said Ghada Shahbandar, an Egyptian rights advocate. “How much more explicit can an image be?”
“It is a disgrace,” she said, lamenting the surreal attempts of the government’s supporters to pin the blame on a shadowy conspiracy as elaborate as a Hollywood thriller. “We have lost the appreciation of human life. We have lost the value of human blood, and we call for more and more killing as though we have not had enough!”
Ms. Sabbagh is just one name on a roster of thousands killed by police gunfire since the Arab Spring began in 2011. More than 800 were killed during the original 18-day uprising against President Hosni Mubarak. About 1,000 more, according to the most credible counts, were killed on one day, Aug. 14, 2013, when soldiers and police officers broke up a sit-in by supporters of the ousted President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hundreds more died in other mass shootings that summer.
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Since then, the killing of protesters — mostly Islamists, but also leftists or liberals, and mostly unarmed — has become an almost weekly occurrence. Sondos Reda, a 17-year-old girl attending an Islamist rally, was killed in clashes with the police in Alexandria on the same day that Ms. Sabbagh died in Cairo. At least 20 others were killed the next day, Jan. 25, on the anniversary of the uprising. A student was killed five days later in clashes with the police at a demonstration in the province of Sharqiya, north of Cairo, and others have reportedly been killed since then in Giza.
But in “a moment of collapsing freedoms,” Ms. Sabbagh has become “a symbol of the revolution,” said Sayed Abu Elela, 31, the friend who held her by the waist in the moments after she was shot.