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A short time after a bomb blast in downtown Cairo on Sunday claimed the lives of two policemen, a group of citizens gathered around the site of the attack and called for one thing: Executing the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement from which ousted president Mohamed Morsi hails.
In doing this, this group had just made its judgment on who is behind the attack, even as bomb disposal experts were still combing the area for other explosive devices and collecting evidence. "The people want the execution of the Brotherhood," the group chanted.
One of the shouters was Fawzya al-Sayed, one of the residents of Boulak, the commercial neighborhood where the blast took place in the morning on Sunday. Soon after hearing the explosion, al-Sayed hurried to the site, which is in close proximity to the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry and adjacent to a preparatory school where al-Sayed's daughter was attending her first hours of the new academic year.
"Brotherhood killers want to kill our children," a tearful al-Sayed told Anadolu Agency. "We have nothing to do with politics," she added.
"We and our children were targeted by this bombing, not policemen," another man of the group said.
The blast took place only hours before Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi starts a visit to New York, his first to the United States since he took over in June this year, to attend meetings of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Also on Sunday, most of Egypt's schools opened their doors for the new academic year.
The bombing took place in a crowded area where a market of second-hand clothes lures thousands of middle-income and poor Egyptians to the place every day
An explosive device, according to an eyewitness, was planted on top of a tree under which a police checkpoint is in place. The explosion killed two policemen and wounded five other people.
Mohamed Gamal, a worker at a nearby shopping mall, said he did not need to wait for the results of investigations in order to know who stood behind the blast.
"The Muslim Brotherhood just want to terrorize and scare us," Gamal said. "They would not have chosen this site for the device if they wanted anything else," he added.
He said such a blast would only be masterminded by the Muslim Brotherhood, adding that the blast served the best interests of the Brotherhood, even without saying how.
Since Morsi's ouster on July 3 last year, the authorities have been accusing the Brotherhood of standing behind a series of attacks that mainly targeted security facilities. The movement counters, however, by saying that it follows peaceful means to express its opposition to what it describes as the "military coup" that brought Morsi's presidential career to an end.
The Brotherhood also accuses the authorities of killing and putting in jail thousands of Morsi's supporters.
Yet, reconciliation was one of the files al-Sisi promised during his presidential campaign to consider when he became president.
On Saturday, al-Sisi said that the Brotherhood had a chance to be part of Egypt's political life, provided that there is no violence or killing, accept real democratic practices and the transfer of power.
However, Sanaa Abdel-Hamid, another resident of the area, was firm in its rejection of any future reconciliation with the Brotherhood.
"I won't accept anybody who calls for reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood," Abdel-Hamid said.
She said her daughter, who was attending at the school next door, was terrified by the explosion.
"I am sending her to school to learn, not to be killed," Abdel-Hamid said.
Mona Ibrahim, whose daughter was also inside the same school at the time of the explosion, agreed.
"The people reject any reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood," Ibrahim said, hugging her daughter.
Another theory -
Away from the discourse of the people who gathered in downtown Cairo to see the site of the explosion, the backers of the ousted president had nothing to talk about but doubts.
Several Morsi supporters pushed the same theory - the authorities had masterminded the blast so that al-Sisi could justify his crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood when he meets world leaders at the U.N. later this week.
"The Muslim Brotherhood have nothing to do with terrorism currently taking place in Egypt," Gamal Heshamt, a member of the Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood who lives outside Egypt, told AA by phone.
"Those who launched the coup against the elected president are responsible for this terrorism," he added.
Heshmat described the bombing as yet a new episode in a series of killings "orchestrated by the regime" to consolidate its position toward the Muslim Brotherhood and also justify its rule before the West.
He said Egyptians had seen no terror or violence from the Muslim Brotherhood over decades.
A spokesman of the pro-Morsi National Alliance for the Defense of Legitimacy, meanwhile, said that Morsi supporters follow peaceful means in opposing the current authorities.
"If we were terrorists, we would not have waited 15 months [after Morsi's ouster] to carry out terrorist operations against those who revolted against legitimacy," Khaled Said told AA.
He added that the alliance depends on what he described as "popular resistance", not violence.
"We do not need to say this, because we have nothing to do with these events at all," Said added.
A judicial source told AA earlier that one of the policemen killed by Sunday's blast was one of the prosecution witnesses in a jailbreak trial in which Morsi is a defendant along with 130 other people.
Said held the current authorities responsible for recent acts of violence across Egypt.
"The violence of the coup authorities and their crimes against the people as well as use of the judiciary as a tool for punishing its opponents forced some youths to resort to violence as a result of injustice and suppression," Said argued.
By Hazem Badr
englishnews@aa.com.tr
www.aa.com.tr/en - Kahire
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