Three killed, 600 hurt as violent Cairo clashes run into night

Hundreds were wounded and three people were killed on Wednesday as several thousand supporters of President Hosni Mubarak attacked anti-government protesters in Cairo by raining stones, bottles and firebombs on each other in scenes of uncontrolled violence as soldiers stood by without intervening, haaretz.com reports.

Government backers galloped in on horses and camels, only to be dragged to the ground and beaten bloody.

At one of the fighting's front lines, next to the famed Egyptian Museum at the edge of Tahrir Square, pro-government rioters blanketed the rooftops of nearby buildings and dumped bricks and firebombs onto the crowd below — in the process setting a tree ablaze inside the museum grounds. Plainclothes police at the building entrances prevented anti-Mubarak protesters from storming up to stop them.

The two sides pummeled each other with hurled chunks of concrete and bottles at each of the six entrances to the sprawling plaza, where the 10,000 anti-Mubarak protesters tried to fend off the more than 3,000 attackers who besieged the square. Some on the pro-government side waved machetes, while the square's defenders filled the air with a ringing battlefield din by banging metal fences with sticks.

The protesters accused Mubarak's regime of unleashing a force of paid thugs and plainclothes police to crush their unprecedented 9-day-old movement demanding his ouster, a day after the 82-year-old president refused to step down. They showed off police ID badges they said were wrested off their attackers.

The health minister announced one dead — a person in civilian clothes who may have been a policeman fell off a nearby bridge — and nearly 600 injured. Al Arabiya reported that three people were killed by Wednesday evening.