Thursday, February 03, 2011

Internet services were at least partially restored in Cairo Wednesday after a five-day cut aimed at stymieing protests against President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Internet users said while Washington voiced concern at attacks on journalists covering the events.

Egypt’s four main Internet service providers cut off access to their customers in a near simultaneous move overnight last Thursday, two days after anti-Mubarak protests – many coordinated via the Internet – began.

Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have become increasingly important for protest organizers, with only a tiny number of users in the Egyptian capital able to access the Internet since Friday.

Internet on mobile telephones was also cut, while mobile voice and text services were also severely disrupted.
Around 23 million Egyptians have either regular or occasional access to the Internet, according to official figures, more than a quarter of the population.

The shutdown in Egypt was the most comprehensive official electronic blackout of its kind, experts said.
Internet users celebrated the return of access Wednesday, including estr4ng3d on Twitter: “Tweeting from the middle of Tahrir Sq. – internet is back in #Egypt #jan25.”
Cairo’s Tahrir Square has been the epicenter of protests against Mubarak.

Several journalists covering the protests were attacked while covering the protests. “We are concerned about detentions and attacks on news media in Egypt. The civil society that Egypt wants to build includes a free press,” U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said on Twitter.

Two Swedish reporters were attacked by an angry mob Wednesday while reporting in an impoverished area of Cairo before a soldier arrested them and held them for several hours, their daily said.

A reporter and a photographer of the Aftonbladet tabloid – who were accompanied by an interpreter and a driver – were reporting on how the poorest Egyptians found food during the unrest that has rocked the Arab nation.
When the journalists got out of their car to ask a woman rummaging through garbage if they could film her, a mob suddenly formed around the pair.

“The crowd took the car keys and, the driver’s SIM card, placed rocks in front of the car wheels and spat in our faces” saying the team was from Israel’s Mossad spy agency, reporter Karin Oestman said.

Earlier, a Belgian journalist was beaten up and dragged off to a barracks in Cairo by non-identified civilians who accused him of supporting Egyptian dissident Mohamed ElBaradei, his newspaper in Brussels said.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper and two Associated Press correspondents were also roughed up during gatherings of Mubarak supporters.

Israeli news media said three Israeli journalists – two members of a television crew and a writer for an Arab Israeli website – were being held for violating the curfew.

Meanwhile, the Qatar-based news channel Al-Jazeera called on the Egyptian satellite company Nilesat to resume broadcasting its signal or face legal action Wednesday, according to the news channel’s website.
“Al-Jazeera warned the Egyptian company [Nilesat] of legal action to demand compensation for serious damage caused to it and its audience,” the channel said. – With agencies