The Egyptian police fired tear gas to break up clashes between supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi and residents of a central Cairo neighbourhood, AFP correspondents said.
The clashes began when dozens of religious scholars affiliated with Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood entered the ministry of endowments and were ordered out by police, a security official said.
They then clashed with residents of the area prompting police to fire tear gas, the official and AFP correspondents said.
The scholars were joined by more pro-Morsi protesters who damaged shop fronts. That further infuriated the residents, who pelted them with stones, leading to sporadic scuffles on several streets.
The confrontations come as Morsi supporters demonstrated outside several government ministries in Cairo.
Loyalists of the deposed Islamist president have set up two huge protest camps in Cairo and have held near daily demonstrations calling for his reinstatement, after his overthrow by the military on July 3.
‘It is a continuation of our revolutionary actions against the coup. It will continue,’ Brotherhood official Farid Ismail said of the protests.
Since police issued last week an ultimatum to end the protests, Islamists have called for nationwide marches to demand the reinstatement of Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected civilian president, toppled and arrested by the military on July 3.
The Anti-Coup Alliance, which supports Morsi, called for a ‘million-man demonstration’ as the judiciary said on Monday it was extending his detention for a further 15 days pending an investigation into his collaboration with Palestinian group Hamas.
Using the slogan ‘Together against the coup d’etat and the Zionists’ for their rally, Morsi’s backers are trying to strike a nationalist chord after an air raid in the Sinai on radical Islamist militants overnight Sunday, which the jihadists have blamed on Israel.
Israeli media says the Jewish state has been in close cooperation with Egypt over the threat from radical Islamist militants in the restive Sinai Peninsula.
Authorities have announced plans to clear pro-Morsi protesters from Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya and Nahda squares with ‘gradual steps,’ to persuade some to leave the squares peacefully before swooping on the hard core that remains.