Egypt boiling again, in the last three years, Egypt have known no peace

 

Protesters have ransacked the Cairo headquarters of President Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood group in an attack that could spark more violence as demonstrators gear up for a second day of mass rallies.

Protest organisers meanwhile gave Mr Morsi until 5pm on Tuesday to step down and called on the police and the military to clearly state their support for what the protest movement called the popular will.

Sunday saw huge numbers flood the streets nationwide in a massive outpouring of anger and frustration with the president and the Brotherhood, the Islamist group that propelled Mr Morsi to power. The protests were largely peaceful, although in a sign of the volatility of the country's divisions, clashes erupted in the evening around the Brotherhood's Cairo headquarters between armed Morsi supporters barricaded inside the building and young protesters pelting it with firebombs and rocks.

After clashes raged overnight, protesters managed to breach the compound's defences and storm the six-storey building, taking furniture, files, rugs, blankets, air conditioning units and portraits of Mr Morsi.

Smoke billowed out of the smashed windows of the fortified villa in the Muqatam district in eastern Cairo. A fire was still raging on one floor hours after the building was stormed. One protester tore down the Muslim Brotherhood sign from the building's front wall, while another hoisted Egypt's red, black and white flag out an upper-story window and waved it in the air in triumph.

At least 16 people nationwide have been killed in violence related to the protests, eight of them at the Brotherhood's headquarters.

Morsi critics view the Brotherhood headquarters as the seat of real power in Egypt, consistently claiming that the Islamist group's spiritual leader, Mohammed Badie and his powerful deputy, Khairat el-Shater, were the ones actually calling the shots in the country, not the president.

Meanwhile anti-Morsi protesters were gearing up for a second day of demonstrations. Some spent the night in dozens of tents pitched in the capital's central Tahrir Square and in front of the president's Ittihadiya Palace. They have vowed to stay there until Mr Morsi resigns. The president's supporters, meanwhile, continued their sit-in in front of a major mosque in another part of Cairo.

Fears were widespread that the collisions between the two sides could grow more violent in coming days. Mr Morsi made clear that he would not step down and his Islamist supporters vowed not to allow protesters to remove one of their own.

Mr Morsi's supporters have depicted the planned protest as a plot by Mubarak loyalists. But their claims were undermined by the extent of Sunday's rallies. In Cairo and a string of cities in the Nile Delta and on the Mediterranean coast, the protests topped even the biggest ones of the 2011's 18-day uprising, including the day Mubarak quit when giant crowds marched on