Rights groups have demanded an inquiry into the conduct of Egyptian police, after at least 23 Sudanese were killed at a squatter camp in Cairo. The Egyptian Government says it regrets the deaths at the camp early on Friday morning, but defends the way the police ended a three-month sit-in by some 3,500 Sudanese. The protesters were demanding resettlement in the West.In the evening, Egyptian and other sympathisers gathered near the site of the deserted encampment for a vigil in memory of the dead, many of them children crushed to death when police fired tear gas and water cannon into crowds of Sudanese. "We've come to stop the killing of poor people," one of the people at the vigil, Mohamed Sallam, said.
"When you kill little babies, things have changed," Wael Khalil said, a protester from the Egyptian opposition movement Kefaya. "We will try you, and you won't be able to travel abroad again," he added, addressing Egyptian police commanders. Minor scuffles later broke out with riot police who were sent to observe the vigil. Some of the protesters taunted the police, pointing at them and chanting: "There are the murderers".
The international group Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for an independent investigation into the deaths, which took place near the Cairo offices of the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR. The United Nations had said the Sudanese were mostly economic migrants, not people in danger of persecution if they went back to Sudan. "President Hosni Mubarak should urgently appoint an independent commission to investigate the use of force by police against Sudanese migrants," the New York-based HRW said. "The high loss of life suggests the police acted with extreme brutality ... A police force acting responsibly would not have allowed such a tragedy to occur," Joe Stork, deputy director of HRW's Watch's Middle East division, said.
Eleven Egyptian groups blamed the Ministry of the Interior for the events and also called for an inquiry. "It (the Ministry) knows no way to deal with people, whether citizens or refugees, other than by beating, crushing, extrajudicial killing, or transfer to illegal detention centres," they said in a joint statement.