Editor’s note: The original video headline has been changed to reflect that the numbers of those reportedly killed is now in the hundreds.
We go to breaking news in Egypt, where security forces have committed a new mass killing of Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators supporting the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi. Dozens of people have been reportedly killed in raids on two pro-Morsi encampments in Cairo. Alastair Beach, Cairo correspondent for The Independent, has been visiting morgues near Rabaa al-Adawiya Square where scores of bodies are reportedly being held. Speaking to us from a hospital where the injured are being treated, Beach says he has personally counted about 83 or 84 bodies today, most of them with gunshot wounds to the head, indicating they have been shot by police snipers.
TRANSCRIPT:
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We go to breaking news in Egypt, where forces have committed a new mass killing of Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators supporting the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi. Dozens of people have been reportedly killed in raids on two pro-Morsi encampments in Cairo.
We turn now to Alastair Beach, Cairo correspondent for The Independent. He’s been visiting morgues in Rabaa, where scores of bodies are reportedly being held. He says he has personally counted about 83 or 84 bodies today, most of them with gunshot wounds to the head, indicating they’ve been shot by police snipers. He spoke to us from a hospital where the injured were being treated. Listen carefully.
ALASTAIR BEACH: I’m in the center of the injured people surrounding on the floor all around me. There’s five or six floors of the hospital, and they’re just telling them to move, such is the level of injuries and dying who have been there, who have been admitted. There’s people being treated on the stairs. Every other minute, it seems, another body is being forced through the front door. All the while there’s just [inaudible] gunfire, automatic, ringing out throughout the encampment.
There’s two makeshift—at least two makeshift morgues which have been established. I was in one of them in a field hospital a couple of hours ago. There were 42 bodies there at the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if that number has risen. There’s a second one I went to close by in which at least 31 bodies were being kept. [inaudible] and it’s so chaotic that the injured are being treated in the same room as the dead bodies are being kept.
I’ve also been to the—at a mosque which lies at the center of the sit-in. At the moment it’s crammed full with hundreds of women and children. At the center of the mosque, on the carpet, there were 10 bodies lying on the floor with a cordon surrounding them. All the while, of course, there’s sustained bursts of gunfire ringing out around this pit and outside.
It’s an extremely precarious situation. The doctors I’ve spoken to have spoken of hundreds of people who have been hit. There’s no [inaudible], and there wasn’t enough time. This is an ongoing situation. But it is an extremely, extremely dangerous situation unfolding in Cairo right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Alastair Beach, Cairo correspondent for The Independent, reporting from a hospital in Cairo, saying there are likely hundreds of people dead as gunshots continue to ring out in Cairo.
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