Thousands of protesters stormed buildings belonging to Egypt’s internal security forces over the weekend, seizing what protesters described as a treasure trove of documents related to the regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.
Mobs of several thousand people broke in to three Interior Ministry buildings on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, including the Cairo headquarters for Amn al Dowla, the agency responsible for domestic security. Some of the buildings were set alight.
Protesters clashed with army troops on Sunday as they tried to enter a prominent Amn al Dowla building in downtown Cairo. Troops fired shots into the air to disperse the protesters.
Egypt’s military government didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Amn al Dowla was the main tool of repression used by Mr. Mubarak’s government during its 30 years in power, according to human-rights activists and analysts. Under Egypt’s emergency law, it routinely arrested citizens and tortured them, activists allege. Since Mr. Mubarak stepped down, the security forces are still running but have kept out of the public eye.
Pro-democracy activists said they entered the buildings because security officials from the former regime had been destroying documents recently—potentially eliminating evidence that could be used to prosecute former officials for crimes including torture.
“We’ve been able to extract hard disks, video disks and CDs,” said Egyptian blogger and rights activist Wael Abbas. Mr. Abbas spent a few hours going through documents at the state security headquarters on Saturday.
The weekend attacks on state security illustrate the kind of citizen justice that continues to galvanize Egyptians to confront symbols and institutions of the old regime. Though Egypt’s former leadership was swept from power nearly a month ago, there has been no public investigation into the Amn al Dowla’s alleged crimes. Protest leaders who toppled Mr. Mubarak have demanded the agency be scrapped.
Over the weekend, Egypt’s new prime minister, Essam Sharaf, appointed cabinet ministers to replace those who had been appointed by Mr. Mubarak or by the military regime shortly after Mr. Mubarak stepped down.
Mr. Sharaf, a respected engineer, succeeded Ahmed Shafiq, appointed by Mr. Mubarak in the last days of his regime. The appointments this past weekend represent the military rulers’ most drastic departure yet from the pre-revolutionary status quo. Picks include a respected retired army general, Gen. Mansour el-Essawy, as the new interior minister. He pledged to rebuild confidence in the country’s 1.4 million-strong security forces, which include the Amn al Dowla.
Protest leaders have set up a Facebook page with images of the scanned documents they say they obtained from the Amn al Dowla buildings.
Mr. Abbas said protesters found a video labeled as having footage of an Egyptian businessman having an intimate relationship with a member of a royal family from a Middle Eastern country. He said he had not seen the contents of the video.
Analysts said the documents could contain sensitive information including the names of informants in organizations that were of concern to Egyptian authorities, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group considered Egypt’s most powerful opposition force.
“Their files would be filled with information on jihadists and the Brotherhood, including the names of informants and sources whose lives will now be in jeopardy,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and fellow at the Brookings Institution, in an email. He said the files were likely to have correspondence with foreign intelligence agencies.
Protest leaders handed over a truckload of documents to Egypt’s public prosecutor’s office, according to an official at the General Prosecutor’s office.
Two teams of a dozen prosecutors were sent to besieged Amn al Dowla buildings to take custody of the documents, now held under military protection at a prosecutors office outside Cairo, the official said.
It was unclear how many documents might have been kept by activists or others.
On Friday, residents of Alexandria, Egypt’s, saw shredded paper outside the Amn al Dowla building, and police stuffing documents into their cars, according to Israa Abdel Fatah, a project coordinator at the Egyptian Democratic Academy, a non-governmental organization. Several hundred people soon gathered and broke into the building.
On Saturday, several thousand people gathered in front of the Amn Al Dowla building on the outskirts of Cairo. Army troops prevented them from entering through the main door, but demonstrators found a side door, Mr. Abbas said. Inside, they found heaps of shredded documents, he said.
Some of the documents related to pro-democracy activists themselves, according to Ms. Fatah. She said her friends found a file on her and showed it to her. “It was my phone records and my messages and my email. They printed my emails,” she said.
Ms. Fatah said she has a history with Amn al Dowla. She said they arrested her twice, once for 18 days in 2008 when she tried to organize a general labor strike through Facebook, and again in 2009 for 36 hours. She said she wasn’t tortured, but could hear screams down the hallway.
The former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, who presided over the country’s internal security apparatus for much of Mr. Mubarak’s term, went on trial Saturday on corruption charges. He pleaded not guilty on all counts.
Meanwhile, the foreign ministry portfolio went to Nabil Al Araby, a former judge for the International Court of Justice. He will replace Ahmed Abul Gheit, who held the post since 2004 and was seen as one of the cabinet’s last holdouts from Mr. Mubarak’s regime.